What the Web Said Yesterday – The New Yorker
The Cobweb http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb 20% of URLs in journal articles suffer from reference rot. Why we need a “Digital Vellum” & Web #archive
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Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress. In 2010, after the announcement, Andy Borowitz tweeted, “Library of Congress to acquire entire Twitter archive—will rename itself Museum of Crap.”
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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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Copyright is the elephant in the archive. One reason the Library of Congress has a very small Web-page collection, compared with the Internet Archive, is that the Library of Congress generally does not collect a Web page without asking, or, at least, giving notice. “The Internet Archive hoovers,” Abbie Grotke, who runs the Library of Congress’s Web-archive team, says. “We can’t hoover, because we have to notify site owners and get permissions.” (There are some
exceptions.)
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Also, it’s riddled with errors. One kind is created when the dead Web grabs content from the live Web, sometimes because Web archives often crawl different parts of the same page at different times: text in one year, photographs in another. In October, 2012, if you asked the Wayback Machine to show you what cnn.com looked like on September 3, 2008, it would have shown you a page featuring stories about the 2008 McCain-Obama Presidential race, but the advertisement alongside it would have been for the 2012 Romney-Obama debate.
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