I know several universities already run url shortening services in-house, only providing access for faculty/staff/etc. One of the drivers for this is guaranteed

I know several universities already run url shortening services in-house, only providing access for faculty/staff/etc. One of the drivers for this is guaranteed longevity - urls in research papers need to live for a long time, but they also need to be short as papers have page limits. In fact, finding that the university which employs me has a url shortener was a happy day - the url looks official, but it took a whole 2 lines from a column in the paper I was writing. If you haven't had the "joy" of trying to fit your whole idea into a short page limit, you may not understand how much space that really is... Remember in high school when you would fudge margins and font and so on, and using big words unnecessarily to reach the minimum pages? Similar tricks are often done in reverse for research papers. If you're going to sell that service to smaller universities that don't run their own, or bigger universities looking to outsource, here's a few things that really matter: 1. Being able to tie into the existing SSO/Federated ID system the university uses. 2. Being able to guarantee lifetimes of the shortened links - perhaps even providing for running the service after the company goes away (if this unfortunately happens). Alternately, providing a way to migrate data to a local machine w/in the university if all else fails. 3. The ability to attach a university affiliated domain name - this lets shortened urls look official rather than shady. 4. The ability to move the shortened url target. Long lifetimes conflict with changes in infrastructure in the customer organization. 5. The ability to notify any/all of: the original poster, the poster's department, and the university it department when target links stop working. 6. (maybe) a caching service in case a long term url goes down - oops the page seems down, but here's a cache of what it last looked like....