Gregory's ServerLink rot is so very, very real.
I just visited a site that 'archives' articles from 2015. The majority of links no longer works.
What to do? You could archive pages, and link to the archived pages (I've seen many people do this). But how durable is that? Will those archival sites exist still in 10 years time?
I'm used to consulting books that are centuries old. That we're unable now to archive digital stuff for longer than a couple of years is terrifying. #archives #digitalhumanities
w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
I think the biggest challenge in fixing this problem is convincing people that it needs to be fixed. I think in some ways this problem is similar to the problems of DRM and planned obsolescence.
@msteenhagen Store stuff on your hard drive or it will be gone. Heck store stuff on your hard drive and it might still be lost due to fuckups or hardware failures. Sadly, even archive.org (with their pretty awesome track record) might go down when funding dries up.
#archives #digitalhumanities
@msteenhagen This is incompetence on the part of the technical and/or content team. Every redesign, migration, or other major change I have been part of had redirects as a top priority.
On the better projects, we also had the resources to go in and update old links to minimise link rot.
There are no excuses not to do this.