Interesting research from University of Colorado counts the occurrence of dead links in scientific journal articles.
Researchers studied 1000 articles, published between 2000-2003,
from three science journals and found 2.6% of the references were from the Internet, and 13% of the Internet links were already inactive.
“References are vital tools for the critical analysis of any argument,� said Dr. Robert Dellavalle, lead author of the study. “While paper journals printed hundreds of years ago can be readily obtained, references to Internet information in the current issues of prominent journals are sometimes unavailable.�
“To preserve the integrity of all academic literature, readers, authors, editors, publishers and librarians must quickly adopt better methods of Internet referencing,�
Interesting research from University of Colorado counts the occurrence of dead links in scientific journal articles.
Researchers studied 1000 articles, published between 2000-2003,
from three science journals and found 2.6% of the references were from the Internet, and 13% of the Internet links were already inactive.
“References are vital tools for the critical analysis of any argument,� said Dr. Robert Dellavalle, lead author of the study. “While paper journals printed hundreds of years ago can be readily obtained, references to Internet information in the current issues of prominent journals are sometimes unavailable.�
“To preserve the integrity of all academic literature, readers, authors, editors, publishers and librarians must quickly adopt better methods of Internet referencing,�
One preservation solution underway is e-archiving, especially important because not only can the links disappear, but the content can change without notice. For e-archiving to work, the whole collection would need to be “persistently� archived. When you start archiving digital formats, you have to make sure you save the software to read them, too.
For more information, read
Reagan Moore’s 1999 paper , detailing an e-archiving project at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. But readers, fair warning is in order, as one of the e-references in this paper is a dead link.
This all is very complicated to me, so, if any of the LISNEWS readers can tell us more about e-archiving, please chime in!
archive.org
Should we start referencing archive.org entries from the Wayback Machine instead of the original in the hopes that the archive will be permanent?
In the time between writing parts of my thesis and submitting it most of the links I used were broken. I updated them prior to submitting but I wouldn’t be surprised if some have already disappeared again.
It’s a real problem because there is a lot of good, essential information online. My only other solution so far has been to print everything I find online. This is still problemmatic because there’s no security so the information can be tampered with; if I lose that printed copy, it in effect no longer exists; and only I have a copy, so it’s not much use to anyone else interested in the information.
Re:archive.org
Too bad archive.org doesn’t capture everything, especially in transition. I print anything I find online that I want to archive to PDF for storage. I also use a tool called SurfSaver from asksam.com to store pages for retrieval later.
Re:archive.org …
I wrote a paper about the Internet Archive and submitted it to a journal for publication. When the editor got back to me (with acceptance, yay!), he noted that the reviewer found a number of dead links
Turned out that the Archive itself underwent a re-org (and went to PHP), and while all of the info was still there, I had to hunt for it. (I should have checked it see if the Archive archives its own pages …)
Speaking of hoping the Archive is permanent, I know that the California State Library has included one government e-document in its catalog that’s stored in the Archive. No telling what happened to “the original” or the agency that issued it.
Re:archive.org
Because I am sure that a lot of the good stuff that I read online may not be there when I return to the site, or has been moved or altered for whatever reason, I keep it.
That is, I copy and paste the text into a new Word document, and title it accordingly. I only do this is I am sure that I may need to refer to the article again one day, and in the event that I use it, I will give credit to the writer/publisher as it appeared on the site previously.