January 2022 – Gregor J. Rothfuss

PURLs are only as good as the maintenance work that has gone into updating the underlying URLs when they inevitably change. And in the lucky cases where the underlying URL haven’t changed, all the work that has gone into managing the infrastructure behind that URL namespace in order for that URL to stay the same. how many of the PURLs still work? This is complex enough for an actual research project and not just a quick blog. Over in the notebook I started by sampling all the target URLs (N=405637 n=662). In the process I noticed that it was oversampling some domains quite a bit like my.yoolib.net. So I tried again, but instead of sampling all the URLs I sampled the PURL namespaces (N=21894, n=644) and picked a random URL from each PURL namespace. This seemed to work better but still seemed to oversample, with hostnames list http://www.olemiss.edu showing up quite a bit. It looks like they might create a new PURL namespace for every finding aid they put up.

Of course, testing whether a URL still works is surprisingly tricky business: the response could be 200 OK but say Not Found, or it could be a totally different page (content drift)

75% of the births in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries went unregistered. Though the US pioneered the institutionalization of a decennial census, it lagged behind European countries in recording births, deaths, and marriages. Such records were not considered a federal matter, and the various states were all over the map with what they collected, if anything.

Progressive Era reformers got state and federal governments to adopt official records of birth during the first 40 years of the 20th century. These replaced affidavits, which were sworn and notarized statements by a child’s parent(s). Affidavits proved untrustworthy when it came to child labor laws: parents cheated, and notaries lied.

“The solution to the problem of enforcing child labor laws was, ironically, to shift the authority to authenticate a child’s birth away from the people who had actually witnessed it—parents. Professionally produced, birth certificates objectified a child’s age and identity, making a truth that existed apart from the personal relations that created the child.”

This was all part of the “bureaucratization, standardization, and quantification of information that accompanied modernization” and the birth of the “information state.” Documentary written evidence was privileged over the “oral and transient.”