Quick to pick up, easy to use
Knowing how to read URLs is a key investigative technique for finding:
The person or organization responsible for the information
Whether the information is live or archived
Others who reference the information
Reading URLS
URLs or Uniform Resource Locators are the Internet addresses of information. Each document or file on the Internet has a unique address for its location.
Here is a dissected URL taken from our URL MicroModule:
Using URL information is particularly helpful in answering several important investigative questions:
1. Who authored or published this information?
The root site is often a clue to ownership.
- In the URL http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt, the name of the organization can be obtained by truncating the url to http://www.ietf.org/. Here IETF stands for The Internet Engineering Task Force, the name found at that truncated address. The home page indicates that the IETC is an organized activity of The Internet Society (ISOC), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1992. The org domain ending supports that claim (although these days anyone can purchase the org domain).
- To find out who owns the domain ietf.org, search whois.net/ or www.pir.prg/whois. For this example, enter ietf in the search box (and in whois.net select org from the drop-down menu). You get the administrator's name and organization's street address--both excellent clues for further investigation, if needed.
A tilde ( ~ ) in the URL indicates personal ownership which identifies the publisher.
- In the URL http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/rfc/2396/toc.html, the tilde (~) is an important indicator of personal ownership. By truncating back to http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ one finds a free information site authored by Jukka “Yucca” Korpela. The root site http://www.cs.tut.fi/tos/ is a Finnish site on which J. Korpela has authority to place self-published information.
2. Is this information from the live Internet or is it archived?
The root site is a clue to whether the site is archived or not.
- In the URL http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/ Guides/Internet/Strategies.html, the first part indicates the page is located on a server operated by the University of California, Berkeley. Edu is a designation for higher education. The lib indicates this is a server for the library.
- The same web page may be found at http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:QNDRL1l00EgJ: www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Strategies.html +search+strategy&hl=en&ct =clnk&cd=1&gl=us Sear. Obviously, this is a much longer URL, but the key is the first part: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache. This is a server where a copy of the page is cached (archived). From the address alone it would be difficult to know that it is a Google server, but the rest of the URL gives away that the query search strategy was used to retrieve this record (see +search+strategy in which the search engine reveals the keywords and operators used). This page is a copy and not necessarily what appears on the live Internet page. Whenever the original URL is embedded in a longer URL like this, it is a sign that the information is archived.
3. What is the information called and does anyone else reference it?
The end of the URL is often a clue as to what the file is.
- In the URL http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt, the file name is rfc2397.txt, a text file. This is the name its owner used to save the file and not the name that should be used in a citation. However, this piece of information is very useful in case you want to search for documents by this name in a database. Investigating other instances of the file may retrieve archived copies of the document in unexpected places as well as pages that reference the document--both of which may reveal something about its perceived value and credibility. Other occurrences may also provide missing information such as a date or author's name.
Practice it now:
1. Who is the owner of this information?2. Is this information live or archived?
http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=radio+telescope& fr=yfp-t-501&u=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_telescope& w=radio+telescope+telescopes&d=G4O0Bv4-PZp7&icp=1&.intl=us
3. Who else references this document?
http://www.pse.che.tohoku.ac.jp/~msuzuki/MagicSquare.prime.seq.html
