Preservation

Published on: August 20, 2019

Save Your Webpages for Posterity, Please: Internet Archive Wayback Machine

By Laura Orr

The Internet Archive serves as, among other things, a repository for webpages. Lawyers (especially), historians (always), librarians (of course), and everyone else can save their webpages to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (Ue their Save Link Now box.)

I save many of URLs I link to in my blog posts and am frequently astounded to find that too few of those URLs have been saved to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These government, nonprofit, NGO, official document, and other URLs should be preserved in the Archive.

If you build, update, rely on website content, please SAVE the URL to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Websites come and go and you never know when you might need to reconstruct, recall, provide evidence based on, or otherwise want to view a retrospective snapshot of a particular website.

Continue reading →

Published on: February 13, 2017

Is Online Information Ever “Permanent?”

By Laura Orr

Your digital photos, letters, books, articles, documents, messages, etc. have no existence unless you pay attention to their preservation – or without electricity, for that matter. (You can’t really hold Zeros and Ones, Nothingness if you will, in your hands, let alone bequeath Nothingness to your heirs without taking serious steps to preserve and authenticate the data.)

See, e.g. from Moritz Law Library at The Ohio State University for what PURLs are:

Research Tip: What is “Permanent” Online?

Continue reading →

Published on: August 12, 2014

Link Rot (404/File Not Found) Symposium: October 24, 2014

By Laura Orr

Symposium: 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent:

“The Web is fluid and mutable, and this is a “feature” rather than a “bug”. But it also creates challenges in the legal environment (and elsewhere) when fixed content is necessary for legal writers to support their conclusions. Judges, attorneys, academics, and others using citations need systems and practices to preserve web content as it exists in a particular moment in time, and make it reliably available.

On October 24, 2014 Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C. will host a symposium that explores the problem of link and reference rot.” [Link to symposium website.]