We’ve all been warned that what we put on the internet never goes away. But just because something is on the World Wide Web doesn’t necessarily mean that it will stay put. The term, “link rot” refers to hyperlinks that no longer connect to their intended pages. The intended resource may have been archived, deleted, or retracted; and the link previously pointing there is now useless. Users may be faced with a ‘404’ error, a blank page, or something completely different than they were seeking.
With the variety of information on the internet, this can mean loosing track of your favorite kitten picture or the citations given supporting Supreme Court decisions; it’s a bigger problem than many people realize. According to a study published in PLoS One, an estimated one in five academic articles published between 1997 and 2012 suffer from link rot.
Thankfully, there are a number of projects that are working to resolve this issue. The Hyberlink Project was started to study the problem of link rot and hopefully offer solutions for the future. If you know when an an old web address was working, you can try entering it into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or the Memento Travel Service and where you can specify the date to see a snapshot of that page taken in the past. While these offer preservation of past websites, what to do with those pages that still exist? Resources may also be assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) number that corresponds to a piece of information and not necessarily a URL, making them discoverable even if the resource has been moved.
If you read my previous post on library fires, you know that loss of data is something librarians care deeply about. Be it information on paper, floppy disk, or posted on the web, information needs to be protected or it can disappear.