link rot

Here's a more in-depth look at the site that "is creating etched-in-stone digital references for scholars and lawyers," GigaOm posted.

The Perma.cc site would solve the issue of broken links to the sources in scholarship by taking readers "to the Perma.cc site where they are presented with a page that has links both to the original web source (along with some information, including the date of the Perma.cc link’s creation) and to the archived version stored by Perma.cc," GigaOm also reports.

As GigaOm also noted, "link rot is a growing issue for both courts and academic journals, but one that is downplayed on the grounds that books and paper are the 'real' authorities while internet sources are ephemeral or, at best, unofficial. As the era of print recedes, however, this anti-digital bias looks more and more untenable."

My prior post on the findings that 50 percent of links in U.S. Supreme Court cases and 70 percent of links in some Harvard law journals are broken: http://www.cultivatedcompendium.com/news/link-rot-50-us-supreme-court-ca...

There was a lot of buzz about the study finding that half of the links in U.S. Supreme Court cases don't work anymore. Moreover, 70 percent of the links in law reviews and other law journals also have rotten away. But what I love about this study is that the scholars behind it are part of an effort to come up with a solution.

Jonathan Zittrain wrotes that "the Harvard Library Innovation Lab has pioneered a project to unite libraries so that link rot can be mitigated.  We are joined by about thirty law libraries around the world to start Perma.cc, which will allow those libraries on direction of authors and journal editors to store permanent caches of otherwise ephemeral links."

Academics are great at revealing problems, but how often do they also figure out a way to solve them?

(Hat tip to Sarah Kiley for sending this post my way.)