I heard this wonderful line in a conversation between Jon Udell and Dan Chudnov. Chudnov said this is a common line among librarians, referring to stories about the noise that inevitably creeps into systems designed to organize information and maintain the organization for the long term.
This was actually one of three related conversations posted by Udell that I listened to recently. All are on topics related to the problem of persistent linking. As with anyone who posts stuff on the Web, I fret about link rot from time to time, but these conversations really expand the complexities of the problem when one considers permanent archiving and retrieving of scholarly and professional publications.
I don't know how familiar you are with these issues (some of you, considerably, I would think), or whether you like to listen to podcasts. If you're interested, here are some links. I give the URLs for the MP3 files themselves, each followed by the URLs for their respective "container" pages. The link sets are in order of oldest to newest recording date.
3 comments:
I fret about link rot too. So I decieded to do something about it.
I created an on demand free web archiving service. Just create your links here.
http://www.stayboystay.com
It has the archive date built right into it. Plus I put a hash into so that you and your readers can be sure that there was no tampering after the fact.
Hope that helps solve at least part of the problem.
Lars
Sorry I missed your comment until now, Lars. Your approach looks like an interesting idea, and I'll keep it in mind.
Stayboystay - mentioned by Lars in his response - is a blatant act of plagiarizing what WebCite http://www.webcitation.org is doing since 1998. WebCite is a de-facto standard used by hundreds of academics and journals, for example Biomed Central journals (see e.g. http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/webcite_links_provide_access_to ).
ORIGINAL (http://www.webcitation.org):
"WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL.
A WebCite® reference is an archived webcitation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future)".
STOLEN (http://www.stayboystay.com/aboutus.php, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TbFbyVLi )
"StayBoyStay.Com is an archiving system for webreferences (cited web pages and websites), which can be used by anybody to ensure that cited web material will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences sare not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a URL. A StayBoyStay.com reference is an archived web citation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future).
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