Re: URL minders Bureau, Suzanne 29 Oct 1997 18:32 UTC
I was asked to forward this reply to the list. Jeanne Towle <jtowle@rrcc.mb.ca> wrote: > We are currently using Netminder's "URL Minder" to notify us when the > URL of an e-journal that we have catalogued has either moved or died. > It will allow us to ask to be notified when there is any change to the > sight, but we do not use that feature for serials, since it would then > notify us anytime a new issue was added. > > We are concerned that this method will not allow us to keep track of > "Title changes" and the like. > > Has anyone found a "URL minder" that they prefer? We are investigating how to monitor ejournals, both in order to record new issues that are made available, and also to identify changes to URLs, jcontents, and titles. We are trying out link-checker software to identify URLs that change. Right now we are using "Linkbot" (http://tetranetsoftware.com/linkbot-info.htm) which gives reasonably reliable results, but the biggest problem we encounter is that during normal working hours the response time is very slow so links may be identified as having no server when actually it's just the Internet connection that is bad. We are also currently doing a trial for 50 ejournals of checking in each issue that becomes available. One of the staff members in our serials check-in section accesses each of the 50 ejournal sites manually once a week to record new issues in our Innopac catalogue. I am looking at software that automatically monitors page changes and gives a notification, hoping that it would alert us to the presence of a new issue on the journal's web page. I looked at "URL-minder" but its documentation indicated that it has a retrieval time-out which may mean that slow servers would not work, and pages that require a password would also probably not work. For those reasons it did not seem suitable for us. I am currently trying "Tierra Highlights2" (http://www.tierra.com) which looks very promising. It does not send an e-mail notification like "URL-minder" but is live on your computer and has a number of customizable features. There are drawbacks with any automated approach. A link-checker will not identify sites that have moved and left a redirection page behind them. Neither a link-checker nor a web page monitor that notifies of changes will alert to changes in titles and content. Despite some investigation I have not found any software that addresses all the problems. Another activity we do is to maintain a "Hotlinks" site which presents an organized selected list of Internet sites. Because we have written short annotations for each link, I have staff manually check the pages of links to verify URLs and to identify annotations that need to be changed. For our ejournals we may end up doing a similar manual process, because until Internet technology can provide tools that will give us everything we need (if ever), it's the only way to really ensure accuracy. ---------- Diana Winninger -- Manager, Non-Serials Selection/Cataloguing Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) Ottawa, Ont. diana.winninger@nrc.ca phone (613) 998-5692 fax (613) 952-8245