URLen som förbindelselänk
en utvärdering av URLers pålitlighet som åtkomstmetod mellan webbresurs och bibliografisk post i LIBRIS och NetSök
The aim of this masters thesis is to study the reliability of the URL as the link between a bibliographic record and a web resource. The Swedish catalogue services LIBRIS and NetSök have been evaluated on three different occasions, to study how these services have succeeded in giving access to web resources by using URLs. Because URLs are changeable, we have tried to find out common characteristics of the URLs in broken links. To accomplish this study we have used a quantitative approach and evaluated five percent of the web resources in the catalogues using a random selection. We have also used documentation relevant for our study, among other things to illustrate previous studies of the nature of web resources and alternative solutions to URLs as access points to web resources. The results of our study indicate that URLs are relatively reliable as access points and links. Our opinion is that to ensure the quality of a library catalogue, a regular link maintenance is a necessity. By shortening the URLs of the broken links, we often got access to the web resources, and thereby we carefully will state that URLs with only domain names are more reliable than more complex URLs.