Feb 3, 2025
Broken links are everywhere. Perma helps authors and journals create permanent links for citations in their published work.
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Broken links are everywhere. Perma helps authors and journals create permanent links for citations in their published work.
Cooking Up a Solution to Link Rot. A blog post at "The Signal: Digital Preservation" on 2015-08-17.
For those with vivid imaginations, the terms “link rot” and “reference rot” might conjure images of moldy fruit in the back of the office refrigerator or a pungent bag of something unidentifiable pulled from under a car seat weeks after its “use by” date. But the food analogy can only go so far. What the terms are really referring to is the all-too-common problem of hyperlinked web addresses — in legal and academic writing or on web pages, for example — that fail to lead the reader to the consumable content desired, either because the link is rotten (not working at all) or because the particular item sought from the Web’s vast menu has been modified or changed.
Read more . . .
...libraries were developed to deal with the problem of scarcity and integrity of resources. It was hard to get a particular book, so 'we'll get one and keep it well indexed and be able to lend it to anybody who needs it and then save it for the next person too,' that was sort of how the physical library worked before. It would seem at first glance that the development of the open web really supplants that, because everything is just a click away and you don't need to borrow your copy, you can just make a copy when you need it. The only problem is that that works until it doesn't...and our study shows that over time, links even to government sites and things you think might be more permanent, they stop working, and all you have is just 'click here to see what we mean,' and then you click and you don't see anything useful. I think there's a real role for universities and libraries to play to take a longer view and make it so the products of our courts that become part of the law of the land, and of legal scholarship, and perhaps later scholarship more generally, are preserved for the ages at least as well as they were in the era in which libraries kept custody of physical documents. We've been working on a more comprehensive solution that involves now about 30 libraries coming together around the world that will make it so if you are writing or editing a piece of scholarship or a legal opinion, you can take the link you're about to pop into the opinion and that is likely to rot within a couple years, and hand it to one of those libraries which will archive it in several different flexible formats. And then that library along with the other libraries will preserve it indefinitely and hand back a link to the system, which is called perma.cc, so the Perma system would contain that stuff forever. And you put the Perma link into your opinion or piece of scholarship, and if people click on it, they will have a chance to see the original link, but if that doesn't work, they'll have an opportunity to see the archive that the author saw and found worthy of preservation.
-Jonathan Zittrain on "The Takeaway" on NPR: http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/supreme-court-links-nowhere/