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[larryc]

Jennifer Howard has what looks to an interesting article at the CHE: "A Modern Scholar's Ailments: Link Rot and Footnote Flight." Mods, could we get a free link? [Free link added. -moderator]

I wonder how other forumites who are working with digital scholarship are dealing with the issue of disappearing digital sources. There are so many rich digital resources at this point that for nearly any field it would be ridiculous not to use them. But whenever I find myself writing a footnote with a URL in it, I feel a twinge and wonder if a reader will be able to find the source in 5 or 10 years. My blog is just a few years old, but when I go through the archive looking for some half-remembered thing I often come across posts based around dead links.

Who else is wrestling with these issues?

[glowdart]

How ironic that the CHE kicked me off and ate my post. 


Short version of what was a long post:  I don't trust technology to work ten minutes from now, much less ten semesters from now.  I remember computers that had no memory after you shut them off. 

So, I make and buy lots of backups.  I buy DVDs and books when they are available, rather than trusting Hulu to work or keep licensing rights to clips.  I rip clips just in case the LOC server crashes mid-semester or that obscure but perfect youtube clip gets yanked.  I like knowing that I can put something on reserve or on the CMS and not have to redesign a lesson mid-semester.  I also then try to never build key lessons around materials for which I can't get or make a legal backup.  I sometimes have a pretty lose interpretation of "fair use," too.   

I print relevant full webpages to PDF and save them just in case.  I create new sets of backups when technology changes storage devices.  I print copies of important documents. 

I spend a week each semester checking all links for the next semester, and that process makes me viciously assess whether or not I truly need a particular source.  And then I make a backup just in case. 

Most of my materials are discrete -- texts, images, clips, a webpage -- and thus can be PDFed or screen-captured or downloaded.  My biggest challenges are websites that are complex -- how do you make a backup of a slide show or a digital exhibition?  Why is it that PBS used to sell videotapes of programming but are not selling (that I can see, yet) copies of their digital content in a form that can be used at home?  Surely, we're going to want to access materials from today....but if I can't make a backup and they're not providing access to it....


I also like to imagine a future where someone who can't find a website in one one of my footnotes contacts me, and I am able to pass along the modern digital version of the yellowing photocopy that sat in my advisor's filing cabinet until someone cared to ask for that article from that European journal that isn't digitized anywhere and that ILL won't pay for. 

[embitteredhistorian]

Yes, I have seen this problem creep up; it is a serious one. Perhaps better use of the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) could help.

[tee_bee]

Yes, I have seen this problem creep up; it is a serious one. Perhaps better use of the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) could help.

Thanks for this link! I had totally forgotten about it, but now it seems to be even better.