Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability

Ms. Rhodes explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites

THE PUTREFACTION OF DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP: HOW LINK ROT IMPACTS THE INTEGRITY OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

Research sits at the core of scholarship. The integrity of that research allows fields of study to grow and build upon one another to form the foundation for and extension of human knowledge. In the last 10 years, a new phenomenon has occurred as digital scholarship has become more prolific. This phenomenon is called link rot. Link rot occurs when over time, digital resources become inaccessible because their originally cited location has been relocated or become permanently unavailable. This study examined the extent to which link rot has affected scholarly research and how it might affect the future of digital scholarship. Historical archived data were compiled and analyzed using a self-created tool to evaluate the extent to which a publication has been affected by the phenomenon of link rot. Study data were accessed through content analysis of 2,500 published, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, representing a span of 10 years (2013– 2022) of data collection. Five specific academic domains in the scholarly literature were identified for study purposes: (a) arts and humanities; (b) business; (c) health and medicine; (d) science, math, and technologies; and (e) social sciences. The study showed that 36% of all links were broken, and 37% of digital object identifiers were broken. The study also showed a significant difference in the percentage of broken links between academic disciplines, as well as the percentage of broken digital object identifier links

Link Rot, Reference Rot, and Link Resolvers

From the earliest days of the web, users have been aware of the fickleness of linking to content. In some ways, 1998 was a simpler time for the Internet. In other ways, like basic website design principles, everything old is new again. Jakob Nielson, writing “Fighting Linkrot” in 1998, reported on a then-recent survey that suggested 6% of links on the web were broken. The advice then hasn’t changed: run a link validator on your site regularly, and update or remove broken links. Also set up redirects for links that do change. The mantra for Nielson was “you are not allowed to break any old links.” Several years later, partly in response to Nielson, John S. Rhodes wrote a very interesting piece called “Web Sites That Heal.” Rhodes was interested in the causes of link rot and listed several technological and habitual causes. These included the growing use of Content Management Systems (CMSs), which relied on back-end databases and server-side scripting that generated unreliable URLs, and the growing complexity of websites which was leading to sloppy information architecture. On the behavioral side, website owners were satisfied to tell their users to “update their bookmarks,” websites were not tested for usability, content was seen as temporary, and many website owners were simply apathetic about link rot. Rhodes also noted the issue of government censorship and filtering, though he did not foresee the major way in which government would obfuscate old web pages, which will be discussed below. Rhodes made a pitch for a web server tool that would rely on the Semantic Web and allow websites to talk to each other automatically to resolve broken links on their own. Although that approach hasn’t taken off, there are other solutions to the problem of link rot that are gaining traction

From Cradle to Grave: The Life Cycle of a Digital Learning Object

Most librarians have probably experienced finding that a website they liked has disappeared, perhaps a video on YouTube, a tutorial, or even just an informative webpage. Sometimes the URL has simply changed, and the item can be found again. Other times the item has truly been retired. Without trying to track down the original creator or hosting body, we may never know exactly what happened nor why. Since we also place links to some of these items on our library webpages, disappearing websites create broken links or “link rot.”1 Librarians are also creators of some of these disappearing websites

The problem of reference rot in spatial metadata catalogues

The content at the end of any hyperlink is subject to two phenomena: the link may break (Link Rot) or the content at the end of the link may no longer be the same as it was when it was created (Content Drift). Reference Rot denotes the combination of both effects. Spatial metadata records rely on hyperlinks for indicating the location of the resources they describe. Therefore, they are also subject to Reference Rot. This paper evaluates the presence of Reference Rot and its impact on the 22,738 distribution URIs of 18,054 metadata records from 26 European INSPIRE spatial data catalogues. Our Link Rot checking method detects broken links while considering the specific requirements of spatial data services. Our Content Drift checking method uses the data format as an indicator. It compares the data formats declared in the metadata with the actual data types returned by the hyperlinks. Findings show that 10.41% of the distribution URIs suffer from Link Rot and at least 6.21% of records suffer from Content Drift (do not declare its distribution types correctly). Additionally, 14.94% of metadata records only contain intermediate HTML web pages as distribution URIs and 31.37% contain at least one HTML web page; thus, they cannot be accessed or checked directly

Content referenced in scholarly articles is drifting, with negative effects on the integrity of the scholarly record

In their 2015 post, Martin Klein and Herbert Van de Sompel reported on the beginnings of an investigation into ‘reference rot’ in scholarly articles. This term incorporated ‘link rot’, whereby referenced web-at-large resources vanished from the web altogether, and ‘content drift’, whereby a resource’s content changed over time to such an extent as to cease to be representative of that originally referenced. Results from the initial study found that between 13% and 22% of references suffered from link rot. Here, Klein and Van de Sompel describe the findings of a more recent study assessing content drift. Results show as much as 75% of referenced content had changed to some degree in just three years, raising significant concerns over the integrity of the scholarly record. However, increased adoption of ‘robust links’ offers a viable solution to this problem

A Dead Link or a Final Resting Place: Link Rot in Legal Citations

A webpage’s URL is often referred to as its address, but frequently it is more like a short-term sublet than a permanent home. This article discusses the problem of link rot in legal citations and advocates for law reviews to adopt DOIs and Perma as complementary solutions

Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea for Adopting DOI

As librarians, we do a fair amount of research online for ourselves and the faculty and students we serve. As researchers, we know that there is nothing more frustrating than encountering a dead link to a much-needed article, particularly when there are deadlines to meet. Dead links (link/ reference rot) can be a particularly frequent occurrence for law review articles because the law review societies that publish them have not yet adopted standards for preserving online access to them, particularly the adoption of a standard for implementing persistent URLs. This Practical Insight is a plea to law reviews and law librarians who manage law review content to adopt the DOI, or Digital Object Identifier standard. A brief description of DOI will be provided, followed by instructions for minting a DOI and integrating DOI URLs into the metadata record of a law review article

Reference rot in web-based scholarly communication and link decoration as a path to mitigation

The failure of a web address to link to the appropriate online source is a significant problem facing scholarly material. Martin Klein and Herbert Van de Sompel together with their collaborators have investigated the extent of reference rot on scholarly domains and their results show an alarming link rot ratio. The authors also explore ways to mitigate it through more systematic web archiving practices and link decoration techniques