Category: link rot

Content referenced in scholarly articles is drifting, with negative effects on the integrity of the scholarly record

In their 2015 post, Martin Klein and Herbert Van de Sompel reported on the beginnings of an investigation into ‘reference rot’ in scholarly articles. This term incorporated ‘link rot’, whereby referenced web-at-large resources vanished from the web altogether, and ‘content drift’, whereby a resource’s content changed over time to such an extent as to cease to be representative of that […]

The Why and What of Web Archives

For someone who thinks about web archiving almost every day it’s sometimes hard to explain to people outside the digital library community why archiving web sites is worth doing. “They archive themselves,” some say. “Why would you want to save what’s on the Internet?” they wonder. Instead of launching into explanations about cultural heritage, dynamic […]