Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Herbert and I attended the " 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent " at the Georgetown Law Library on Friday, October 24, 2014.  Although the origins for this workshop are many, catalysts for it probably include the recent Liebler  & Liebert study about link rot in Supreme Court opinions ,  and the paper by Zittrain, Albert, and Lessig about Perma.cc and the problem of link rot in the scholarly and legal record and the resulting popular media coverage resulting from it  (e.g., NPR and the NYT ).  The speakers were naturally drawn from the legal community at large, but some notable exceptions included David Walls from the GPO , Jefferson Bailey from the Internet Archive, and Herbert Van de Sompel from LANL. The event was streamed and recorded, and videos + slides will be available from the Georgetown site soon so I will only hit the highlights below.  After a welcome from Michelle Wu, the director of the Georgetown Law L

Herbert and Martin attended the recent Fall 2013 CNI meeting in Washington DC, where they gave an update about the Hiberlink Project (joint with the University of Edinburgh), which is about preserving the referential integrity of the scholarly record. In other words, we link to the general web in our technical publications (and not just other scholarly material) and of course the links rot over time.  But the scholarly publication environment does give us several hooks to help us access web archives to uncover the correct material. As always, there are many slides but they are worth the time to study them.  Of particular importance are slides 8--18, which helps differentiate Hiberlink from other projects, and slides 66-99 which walk through a demonstration of the " Missing Link " concepts (along with the Memento for Chrome extension ) can be used to address the problem of link rot.  In particular, absent specific versiondate attributes on a link, such as: <a vers