The Web dwells in a never-ending present. The Wayback Machine aims to preserve its past.

Talks about significant properties without actually using the phrase!

The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject. We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced. We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

Update GPO has released an official version of the “THE SENATE CIA REPORT” as Senate Report 113-228. The digital version is available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys): http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-113srpt288/pdf/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf The print version is available for purchase at GPO’s retail and online bookstore for $29. http://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-071-01571-0 This is a single-volume, 712 page version. It contains: Letter … Continue reading →

Collecting, preserving, and providing access to at-risk web content for institutional, public, and scholarly uses.

"We had no idea that we were making history and were just trying to get the job done in our 'spare' time',” Louise Addis, one of the WWWizards team who developed the SLAC website from 1991, said during our conversation about the restoration of SLAC's earliest website. Last May, Nicholas Taylor, web archiving service manager, told me, "SLAC has a historical collection of webpages that may be the first website in the US. Can we help them to find a home for this archive?” As Web archivist, I felt that I found a treasure. I replied, "Of course, Stanford Web Archive Portal should be the home."One of the major use cases for the Web Archiving Service is preserving Stanford University web content. The earliest SLAC website represent the oldest such content we could find; it is the first website in the US dated to 1991, so we started there. Stanford Web Archiving Service launched its portal this week which featured SLAC's earliest website that was kept on SLAC servers for many years. This Halloween, it comes back to life. Our task was to convert the original list of scattered files into an accessible, browsable website with temporal navigation. In this post, I will discuss the technical challenges of and lessons learned from restoration process.

Collect and revisit web pages — Free, open-source web archiving service.

How to build an archivable website.

This paper presents the results of a survey of quality assurance (QA) practices within the field of web archiving. To understand current QA practices, the authors surveyed 54 institutions engaged in web archiving, which included national libraries, colleges and universities, and museums and art libraries.

Really does help to have human beings pointing out the important bits!

Before the NSA revelations and Buzzfeed listicles, there was the early web. And it was an incredible blend of personal, mundane, and extraordinary.

In an age in which uninterrupted access to the sum total of human knowledge now seems a given, we're in paradoxical danger of losing a lot of recent history, writes Drew Turney.

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.

Rebuilding Prodigy, one screen at a time