Tuesday, 25 November, 2003

A fish, a barrel, smoke - - file 404: gun not found. I read an article (read it while holding a paper-based news delivery system) on 404'd web sites On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral (washingtonpost.com). The article is in line with others I've read about the dark(ening) web and dead blogs. This one considering impact on research made me stop and think. My first thought, being thoroughly old school, was: what are people doing citing links in a research paper? As much as I like the www, I think I regard it in my heart as being like the beautiful frost patterns that used to form on my bedroom window on those cold winter mornings back in Massachusetts. It would be there when you got up, it would be gone when you went to grab your books before running off to the bus, but there would be another one the next morning. Now with so much information existing in its primary form as a web document, research can't always fall back on the expediency of citing in more traditional form (Chicago, APA, MLA - choose your poison) an alternate print publication. Article has some nice quotes from Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, and mentions the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) concept. I know Jakob Nielsen and others has been stressing the absolute need for permanence and stabality in URI's for years. Problem with the web is that it shifts the burden towards the content creator / provider where with print, sorting it out and storing it fell to libraries and librarians, generally a government function. But hey as long as the Suck.com archive is still up, what me worry. Addendum: sorry I seem to have left an empty link to the suck.com magazine archive originally. it's fixed now. 12:26:59 AM    comment [];trackback [];

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 12/02/03; 10:43:58.