[ih] Link rot (was: Museum archiving (was: Re: IENs))

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 09-May-21 09:51, Dave Walden wrote:
> Historian Jim Cortada recommends keeping copies of web pages one sites in his book Hunting History.

That can be easier said than done. Many if not all "modern" web sites are 
print-unfriendly (i.e. when you print them to paper or to PDF, you don't get what was on your screen). Also, it's usually no good doing "save as HTML" because it uses numerous external resources. Also, many sites are now so dynamic that even 5 minutes later, the content is different. In some 
cases I've been reduced to screen shots, or distilling raw text and saving that.

I used to say that the Internet contains its own history, but it seems that these days the Web is destroying its own history.

   Brian

> One could submit the URL copies along with one's contributions to an archive.  
> 
> On Sat, May 8, 2021, 4:46 PM John Day via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Couldn’t agree more.  A URL as a citation is practically useless. The Internet is not much of an archive.
> 
>     > On May 8, 2021, at 16:17, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com <mailto:brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     > On 09-May-21 02:44, Ole Jacobsen via Internet-history wrote:
>     > ...
>     >> I'll just note that there used to be a direct URL for ConneXions 
in the CBI
>     >> hosted publications archive, but that has recently changed. Another peril
>     >> of online museums.
>     >
>     > Indeed, and I wonder whether this august body could somehow try to change the thinking of archivists about that problem. Just over the last year or so, I've been digging in archives quite a bit (for  doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2020.2990647 <http://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2020.2990647> and a forthcoming follow-up) and even in that time, some URLs have rotted, which makes it annoying to go back and follow up a new detail, and invalidates published citations. Over the longer term, say 10 years, even more links rot and search results become misleading or useless.
>     >
>     > (Or maybe that's a topic for the SIGCIS list.)
>     >
>     > Regards
>     >   Brian Carpenter
> 
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