URL for DL links

[Richard H.]

Another wishlist item which might well get promoted to near the front of the enhancements queue...

Currently the URL for a document stored in the DL is extremely long-winded and technical in nature. For example:

/dl/staff/handle/6997376640171399815/uob-dl-librarian.pdf

... when what we would really want is something much shorter like /dl/staff//uob-dl-librarian.pdf

Is there a way that the DL URLs can be a little more friendly? There are times when URLs for documents might be promoted elsewhere, and the shorter URL would look much better than the longer one!

[Eric Casteleijn (thisfred)]

The urls in the DL, as far as I understand, are not meant to be human readable, since the interaction with the document library will be mostly through other systems, through OAI-Harvesting, for instane. The main design requirement for the handle urls is that they are globally unique and remain the same over time. This is almost impossible to guarantee with human readable, i.e. meaningful ids.

[Richard H. (richard-hewison)]

Understood. It's a shame, but at least we have a technical reason for why the URLs themselves are a bit unfriendly!