To the Rescue of the Orphans of Scholarly Communication presentation at CNI Spring 2017 meeting Herbert Van de Sompel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6126 Mich…

This study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot, that is, linkrot plus content drift. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total, extracting 11,437 links, finding overall that 77% of links were active, and 23% exhibited linkrot.  A stratified random sample of 49 ETDs was performed which produced 990 active links, which were then checked for content drift based on mementos found in the Wayback Machine.  Mementos were found for 77% of links, and approximately half of these, 492 of 990, exhibited content drift. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.   

In Part 2  of this series I criticized Kalev Leetaru's Are Web Archives Failing The Modern Web: Video, Social Media, Dynamic Pages and The M...

This is how we're starting to preserve the archive of the first Social Media presidency.

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.

Increasingly, scholarly articles contain URI references to “web at large” resources including project web sites, scholarly wikis, ontologies, online debates, presentations, blogs, and videos. Authors reference such resources to provide essential context for the research they report on. A reader who visits a web at large resource by following a URI reference in an article, some time after its publication, is led to believe that the resource’s content is representative of what the author originally referenced. However, due to the dynamic nature of the web, that may very well not be the case. We reuse a dataset from a previous study in which several authors of this paper were involved, and investigate to what extent the textual content of web at large resources referenced in a vast collection of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles published between 1997 and 2012 has remained stable since the publication of the referencing article. We do so in a two-step approach that relies on various well-established similarity measures to compare textual content. In a first step, we use 19 web archives to find snapshots of referenced web at large resources that have textual content that is representative of the state of the resource around the time of publication of the referencing paper. We find that representative snapshots exist for about 30% of all URI references. In a second step, we compare the textual content of representative snapshots with that of their live web counterparts. We find that for over 75% of references the content has drifted away from what it was when referenced. These results raise significant concerns regarding the long term integrity of the web-based scholarly record and call for the deployment of techniques to combat these problems.

Berkeley Electronic Press Selected Works

We've watched Facebook bend to government censorship and the company will do it again, says Jarrett Drake. It's foolish to think otherwise.

On September 27th, 2016 I was part of a panel titled “Concerns for Data Scholarship” at the Library of Congress’ symposium, Collections As…

The Twitter API is a powerful tool for archiving, but its use poses particular challenges for archivists.

The OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group (WAM, of course) was launched last January and has been working hard–really hard–ever since. Twenty-five members from Partner libraries and archives have …

thistweetcalledmyback:

The fate of Cooper’s long-running Web site is a chilling reminder that creative work lives online at the mercy of the platforms that host it.