Using a Web-Archiving Service - How to ensure your cited web-references remain available and valid

In today’s electronic information age, academic authors increasingly cite online resources such as blog posts, news articles, online policies and reports in their scholarly publications. Citing such webpages, or their URLs, poses long-term accessibility concern due to the ephemeral nature of the Internet: webpages can (and do!) change or disappear1 over time. When looking up cited web references, readers of scholarly publications might thus find content that is different from what author/s originally referenced; this is referred to as ‘content drift’. Other times, readers are faced with a ‘404 Page Not Found’ message, a phenomenon known as ‘link rot’2. A recent Canadian study3 for example found a 23% link rot when examining 11,437 links in 664 doctoral dissertations from 2011-2015. Older publications are likely to face even higher rates of invalid links. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to make your cited web references more stable. The most common method is to use a web archiving service. Using a web archiving service means your web references and links are more likely to connect the reader to the content accessed at the time of writing/citing. In other words, references are less likely to “rot” or “drift” over time. As citing authors, we have limited influence on preserving web content that we don’t own. We are generally at the mercy of the information custodians who tend to adjust, move or delete their web content to keep their site(s) current and interesting. All we can do to keep web content that we don’t own but want to cite intact so that our readers can still access it in years to come is to create a “representative memento" of the online material as it was at the time of citing. This can be achieved by submitting the URL of the webpage we want to cite to a web archiving service which will generate a static (‘cached’) copy of it and allocate it a new, unique and permanent link, also called ‘persistent identifier’. We can then use this new link to the archived webpage rather than the ephemeral link to the original webpage for our citation purposes. There are a range of web archives available. This guide contains a list of trusted web archiving services

Nuovi servizi a valore aggiunto per riviste elettroniche di studi classici

Le riviste elettroniche sono decisamente meno diffuse in ambito umanistico piuttosto che scientifico, non tanto per un ritardo delle discipline umanistiche in questo senso quanto per la diversa rispondenza del medium alla disciplina stessa. La vasta gamma di funzionalità e servizi che possono essere offerti online in aggiunta alla copia stampata di una rivista costituisce una delle più importanti differenze tra l'editoria tradizionale e quella elettronica. L'attuale offerta ed i futuri sviluppi delle riviste nell'ambito delle scienze umane sono analizzati attraverso i dati raccolti con un sondaggio sulle caratteristiche di una rivista elettronica, del tipo di diritti impiegati, degli strumenti elettronici usati nel lavoro editoriale e degli elementi che ne ostacolano la diffusione. Ne risulta una realtà ancora legata alla pubblicazione a stampa; nel caso di esistenza di riviste elettroniche, la presenza di una forma non innovativa, che ricalca piuttosto la forma tradizionale. Inoltre, sono stati rilevati pregiudizi sulla qualità delle risorse elettroniche, sull'accuratezza degli articoli, sulla loro persistenza e reperibilità on-line, e dubbi sui diritti d'autore. Nonostante i timori degli editori, l'editoria on-line può tuttavia divenire un fertile campo in cui l'accesso libero si sposa con la nascita di funzionalità aggiuntive. I servizi a valore aggiunto possono incentivare l'uso delle riviste di un'area disciplinare come quella umanistica, in cui le riviste elettroniche hanno ancora poca diffusione.E-journals are undoubtedly less widespread in the Humanities than in the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) field. This is not just because of a lag in Humanities journals' development, but also because of the different extent at what electronic publishing technologies fit respectively the different nature and requirements of disciplines. The wide range of functionalities and services that can be offered online in addition to the print copy of a journal is one of the most important differences between paper-based and electronic publishing. Value Added Services (VAS) represent also a key aspect to be leveraged in the development of a sustainable business model for open access journals. VAS need to be though carefully. To provide them comes at a cost and it is a process that can just partly be automated. The paper aims at designing a new model for Classics e-journals specifically tailored on classicists' needs, identifying a set of functionalities that may be provided by e-journals on the basis of a deep understanding of the field and of recent user studies. The implementation of such functionalities and the automatisation of the process needed to enable them are then discussed in detail

Web Archiving in the UK: Current Developments and Reflections for the Future

This work presents a brief overview on the history of Web archiving projects in some English speaking countries, paying particular attention to the development and main problems faced by the UK Web Archive Consortium (UKWAC) and UK Web Archive partnership in Britain. It highlights, particularly, the changeable nature of Web pages through constant content removal and/or alteration and the evolving technological innovations brought recently by Web 2.0 applications, discussing how these factors have an impact on Web archiving projects. It also examines different collecting approaches, harvesting software limitations and how the current copyright and deposit regulations in the UK covering digital contents are failing to support Web archive projects in the country. From the perspective of users’ access, this dissertation offers an analysis of UK Web archive interfaces identifying their main drawbacks and suggesting how these could be further improved in order to better respond to users’ information needs and access to archived Web content