Breaking down link rot: The chesapeake project legal information archive's examination of URL stability

Law Library Journal

Volumn 102, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 581-597

  Rhodes, Sarah ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78650099698     PISSN: 00239283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. See, e.g., Jim Barksdale & Francine Berman, Saving Our Digital Heritage, WASH. POST, May 16, 2007, at A15 (giving the average life span as forty-four to seventy-five days);
2. Gail Fineberg, Capturing the Web: Staff Briefed on National Digital Preservation Plan, LIBR. CONG. INFO. BULL. (Apr. 2003), available at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0304/digital.html;
3. Brewster Kahle, Preserving the Internet, Sci. AM., Mar. 1997, at 82, 83.
4. Peter Lyman, Archiving the World Wide Web, in COUNCIL ON LIBRARY & INFO. RES., BUILDING A NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATION 38, 38 n. 1 (2002), available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/ reports/pub 106/pub 106.pdf.
5. See Wallace Koehler, A Longitudinal Study of Web Pages Continued: A Consideration of Document Persistence, INFO. RES., Jan. 2004, http://informationr.net/ir/9-2/paperl74.html (briefly discussing link rot and other terms used to describe the disappearance of content from URLs).
6. Legal Info. Archive, The Chesapeake Project, http://www.legalinfoarchive. org (last visited July 18,2010) [hereinafter Chesapeake Project].
7. The number of titles was gathered from statistics reported by each participating library, and the number of digital items came from the project's CONTENTdm Administration module.
8. See Legal Info. Archive, The Chesapeake Project, Project Reports & Documentation, http:// www.legalinfoarchive.org/custompages/documentation.php for previous evaluations and discussions of project evaluation parameters.
9. See Preserving Legal Information for the Twenty-First Century: Toward a National Agenda, 96 LAW LIBR. J. 655,
10. 2004 LAW LIBR. J. 46.
11. Id. at 655, ¶¶ 1-3.
12. Id. at 656, ¶ 6.
13. Id. at 657,¶ 8.
14. Legal Info. Preservation Alliance, Strategic Plan Outline 2 (June 20, 2006), http://www.aall net.org/committee/lipa/StratPlanFinalDraft20060620.doc.
15. Chesapeake Project, supra note 4.
16. Sarah Rhodes & Dana Neacsu, Preserving and Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digitally Born Legal Information, 18 INFO. & COMM. TECH. L. 39, 58, 60 (2009). The Chesapeake Project uses the OCLC Digital Archive for the preservation of its digital collections and an OCLC-hosted CONTENTdm interface at http://www.legalinfoarchive.org for user access to archived collections.
17. See CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, FIRST-YEAR PILOT PROJECT EVALUATION 2 (2008), http://www.legalinfo archive.org/policies/LEGAL-FirstYearProjectEvaluation.pdf.
18. Chesapeake Project, Announcing the Chesapeake Project Web Interface, LEGALINFOARCHIVE .ORG (Sept. 17, 2008), http://legalinfoarchive.Org/custompages/ news.php#20080917.
19. CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, COLLECTION PLAN 4-5,30 (updated Jan. 2010), available at http://www .legalinfoarchive.org/policies/LEGAL-CollectionPlan-Updated-2010- 01.pdf (providing a description of the project team and organizational structure).
20. NAT'L DIGITAL INFO. INFRASTRUCTURE & PRES. PROGRAM, COLLECTION PLAN TEMPLATE (Aug. 24, 2006), http://web3.unt.edu/webatrisk/reports/cpg-template- ikh-24aug2006.doc.
21. See CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, supra note 16, at 21.
22. TRUSTWORTHY REPOSITORIES AUDIT & CERTIFICATION: CRITERIA AND CHECKLIST (Feb. 2007), available at http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/ attachments/pages/trac-0.pdf.
23. Ctr. for Research Libraries, Advisory Assessment of the Chesapeake Project 2 (2009) (on file with author).
24. LEGAL INFO. PRES. ALLIANCE, THE LEGAL INFORMATION ARCHIVE: A SOLUTION FOR PRESERVING AND ENSURING LONG-TERM ACCESS TO DIGITALLY BORN LEGAL INFORMATION (2010), available at http:// listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/law-lib/law-lib.log 1003/att-0117/01 -LegalInfoArchive.pdf.
25. See CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, supra note 16, at 8.
26. Koehler, supra note 3.
27. Robert P. Dellavalle et al., Going Going, Gone: Lost Internet References, 302 SCIENCE 787, 787 (2003).
28. Michael Bugeja & Daniela V. Dimitrova, The Half-Life Phenomenon: Eroding Citations in journals, 49 SERIALS LIBR. 115, 117 (2005).
29. Randy J. Carnevale & Dominik Aronsky, The Life and Death of URLs in Five Biomedical Informatics journals, 76 INT'L J. MED. INFORMATICS 269, 271 (2007).
30. Edmund Russell & Jennifer Kane, Research Note, The Missing Link: Assessing the Reliability of Internet Citations in History journals, 49 TECH. & CULTURE 420, 427 fig.2 (2008).
31. Susan Lyons, Persistent Identification of Electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes, 97 LAW LIBR. J. 681,
32. 2005 LAW LIBR. J. 42.
33. Ailsa Parker, Link Rot: How the Inaccessibility of Electronic Citations Affects the Quality of New Zealand Scholarly Literature [12] (2007), available at http://works.bepress.eom/ailsa-parker/l.
34. Coleen M. Barger, On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a judge: Appellate Courts' Use of Internet Materials, 4 J. APP. PRAG & PROCESS 417, 438 (2002).
35. Mary Rumsey, Runaway Train: Problems of Permanence, Accessibility, and Stability in the Use of Web Sources in Law Review Citations, 94 LAW LIBR. J. 27, 35 tbl.1,
36. 2002 LAW LIBR. J. 2 tbl.1.
37. Helane E. Davis, Keeping Validity in Cite: Web Resources Cited in Select Washington Law Reviews, 2001-03,98 LAW LIBR. J. 639,646,
38. 2006 LAW LIBR. J. 38124.
39. Id. at 661, 165.
40. Rumsey, supra note 31, at 35, 125.
41. David C. Tyler & Beth McNeil, Librarians and Link Rot: A Comparative Analysis with Some Methodological Considerations, 3 PORTAL: LIBR. & ACAD. 615,621-22 (2003).
42. John Markwell & David W. Brooks, Evaluating Web-Based Information: Access and Accuracy, 85 J. CHEM. EDUC. 458,458 (2008);
43. C. Rockelle Strader & Farrell D. Hamill, Rotten but Not Forgotten: Weeding and Maintenance of URLs for Electronic Resources in The Ohio State University Online Catalog, 53 SERIALS LIBR. 163, 174 (2007).
44. CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, supra note 14, at 15.
45. CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, TWO-YEAR PILOT PROJECT EVALUATION 32-33 (2009), http://www .legalinfoarchive.org/policies/legal-twoyearprojectevaluation- june2009.pdf.
46. For more information on WARC files,
47. see Nat'l Digital Info. Infrastructure & Pres. Program, WARC, Web ARChive File Format, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000236. shtml (last updated Sept. 2, 2009).
48. Koehler, supra note 3.
49. Barger, supra note 30, at 438;
50. Davis, supra note 32, at 646;
51. Rumsey, supra note 31, at 35.
52. CHESAPEAKE PROJECT, supra note 16, at 2.
53. Id. at 3.