History
The PURL concept was developed at OCLC in 1995 and implemented using a forked pre-1.0 release of Apache HTTP Server. The software was modernized and extended in 2007 by Zepheira under contract to OCLC and the official website moved to (the 'Z' came from the Zepheira name and was used to differentiate the PURL Open-source software site from the PURL resolver operated by OCLC).
PURL version numbers may be considered confusing. OCLC released versions 1 and 2 of the Apache-based source tree, initially in 1999 under the OCLC Research Public License 1.0 License and later under the OCLC Research Public License 2.0 License (http://opensource.org/licenses/oclc2). Zepheira released PURLz 1.0 in 2007 under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The newest implementation of PURLs, PURLz 2.0, is currently in Beta testing and is also released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The oldest PURL HTTP resolver has been operated by OCLC since 1995 and can be reached as purl.oclc.org as well as purl.org, purl.net, and purl.com.
Other notable PURL resolvers include the US Government Printing Office (http://purl.fdlp.gov), which is operated for the Federal Depository Library Program and has been in operation since 1997.
Current versions of the PURL software and production instances are supported by 3 Round Stones.
Read more about this topic: Persistent Uniform Resource Locator
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