Intro to Web Archiving: Fight Link Rot and Preserve Your Citations

Content on the web is in constant flux: rapidly appearing, updating, and disappearing. Often seemingly stable pages become inadvertently broken or altered through a gradual process of content and technology updates. This makes citing and referencing information on the web risky!

Web pages cited in your papers and used in research are in danger:

“Over 50% of cited links in Supreme Court opinions no longer point to the intended page. Roughly 70% of cited links in academic legal journals and 20% of all science, technology and medicine articles suffer from link rot” (Perma.cc).

puzzle with missing piece

You can fight link rot by creating permanent archived records of web pages with Archive.org and Perma.cc.

This session will introduce web archives, what you can find in them, how you can use them to verify and preserve citations to web pages, and best practices for citing web pages in your articles.

Contents:

Content: CC BY-SA evan will 2024 (get source code). Creative Commons License

Theme: workshop-template-b by evanwill is built using Jekyll on GitHub Pages. The site is styled using Bootstrap.