December 12, 2005

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

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