Links on the Internet can be brittle, and it doesn’t take much shifting for an important source or article to disappear after being cited authoritatively. Times Higher Education has highlighted a new consortium, Perma CC, that seeks to provide a central archive for important webpages referenced in scholarly works and legal documents.
“Link rot” is a common problem in academic archiving, as webpages have a unique way of transcending their citations. A record of the time and date of access, author, and title matter little when the page is just gone.
A review cited by Times Higher Education found that 70 percent of the links cited in three Harvard law journals no longer worked after 12 years. For The New England Journal of Medicine, 13 percent of links cited didn’t work after 27 months. Forty-nine percent of citations in US Supreme Court decisions are no longer functional.
Perma CC is the product of a coalition of law libraries, including those at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Oxford. The site is intended to be a permanent place to host sourced material, where authors or publishers can hand off a URL and the page will be hosted permanently on Perma CC’s services as well as mirror sites.
The site is focused on legal citations for now, though the rest of the fractious Internet could use it, too. The Wayback Machine can only take us so far.