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
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Reading URLS - Part 3
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:
Part 1: Who authored or published this information?
Part 2: Is this information from the live Internet or is it archived?
Part 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.
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