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The Researching Paralegal

Category Archives: Link Rot

Link Rot – When A Hyperlink Festers and Rots.

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Citations, Legal Technology, Legal Writing, Link Rot

≈ Comments Off on Link Rot – When A Hyperlink Festers and Rots.

Tags

Jonathan Zittrain, Legal Citations, Legal Rebels Blog, Link Rot, Perma CC, Tom Majors, Victor Li

Jonathan Zittrain: Fighting ‘Link Rot’ In Court Opinions and Legal Scholarship, by Victor Li, Legal Rebels Blog (with hat tip to Tom Majors!)

http://tinyurl.com/nfrr7gm

Link rot is real. It creates havoc in court opinions that include hyperlinks. Perma.cc, unfortunately, is not the magic bullet for link rot. I have tried using it for links to this blog, only to find later that the link no longer works. Perma.cc is sorry about that, but does not have a real answer for that problem. Use it with caution. -CCE

Sure, it’s annoying when you click on a link and get that ‘404’ message or an automatic redirect to the homepage. But when it comes to legal research, dead links aren’t just annoying; they can undermine the entire premise of an opinion, article or treatise. . . .

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Link Rot – How To Archive The Internet?

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Footnotes, Legal Technology, Link Rot

≈ Comments Off on Link Rot – How To Archive The Internet?

Tags

beSpacific Blog., Content Drift, Footnotes, Internet, Jill Lepore, Link Rot, Reference Rot, Sabrina I. Pacifici, URLs

The Cobweb – Can The Internet Be Archived?, by Sabrina I. Pacifici, BeSpacific Blog

http://www.bespacific.com/cobweb-can-internet-archived/

This is not my first post on “link rot.” There are groups who are looking for solutions, but I cannot in confidence say that there is yet a definitive answer. -CCE 

The New Yorker – Annals of Technology. January 26, 2015 Issue. The Cobweb Can the Internet be archived? By Jill Lepore

‘…The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: ‘Page Not Found.’ This is known as ‘link rot,’ and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as ‘content drift,’ and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as ‘reference rot,’ have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, ‘more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.’ The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand…’

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