Entries for December 12, 2005

200 ENTRIES!!!

I just wanted to post and say this is my 200th entry. I have received great benefit from all the comments, suggestions, and discussion my blog has generated. I look forward to all the future discussions.

Universities Are Warming Up to Wikis

I am catching up on my reading, and I see that Jeremy Smith shared how the Case Wiki is gaining attention.

Blog Updated

I have redesigned my blog over the last several days. In addition to a new look, I have added several functions recently.

• Added About Me page (currently nothing more than my vita)
  
• Individual entries now have a "Google It" link, so you can see what else exists on that topic
  
• Each category had a dedicated RSS feed, so you can follow an individual topic (I describe the implementation process on the Case Wiki)

Persistent Identification of Electronic Documents

Susan Lyons in Persistent Identification of Electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes (Law Library Journal, Volume 97, Number 4, Fall 2005) discusses link rot and a possible solution.

She highlighted several studies that showed various dangerous ramifications of URL links vanishing very quickly, including:

• Law review articles only included 4 web citations in 1994, but had grown to 96,000+ by 2003
  
• A study in 1994 by Wallace Koehler, showed ~32% of web pages vanish after one year
  
• In 2000, a study of URL citations in academic journals showed that half of the links had died after 3 years