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New Link Rot report from Chesapeake
For the past five years, the Georgetown Law Library and the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group have been doing doing studies on "link rot." This year, they discovered that "link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years."
- "Link Rot" and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2012 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group.
- Georgetown Law Library Finds 38 Percent of Online Documents Disappear from Web Pages Within Five Years, press release, Georgetown University (April 25, 2012).
10% in 2008 13% in 2009 25% in 2010 31% in 2011 36% in 2012Cumulative link rot of state government URLs (.state.__.us) were almost as bad: 10.8% in 2008 15.8% in 2009 32.1% in 2010 30.4% in 2011, and 33.8% in 2012. The total cumulative link rot for all URLs was 37.7% in 2012. Another way of looking at this is that, of the documents the Chesapeake Project has preserved, only only 62.3% were still available at their original URL as of the 2012 study. This year's report includes two samples of URLs. The first sample includes 579 URLs that Chesapeake captured during 2007 and 2008. They use this sample to examine how link rot changes over time. The second sample is a new and represents the full content of the Chesapeake archive at the time the study was conducted. Using this second, broader sample the study reports a link rot rate of 25.9%. For libraries that rely on pointing to URLs rather than preserving information in their own digital libraries, the new report from the Chesapeake Project provides sobering, factual data on the reliability of that strategy. Continue reading
Tool for verifying federal social media accounts
The General Services Administration has launched two new sites: one for federal agencies to register their social media accounts and one for users to verify if a social media account is really an official federal account.
- GSA tool lets people verify genuine federal social media accounts, By Alice Lipowicz, FCW (Apr 27, 2012). Federal agencies need help tracking their social media accounts, and citizens need help verifying which government accounts are authentic. Now the General Services Administration has stepped in to address both of those concerns with a new online solution.
- Verify federal U.S. government social media accounts, USA.gov The government uses social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to connect with people and communicate official information, so it's important to know if a social media account is really managed by the government. We're currently working on a tool that will let you verify if a social media account is officially managed by the U.S. government. This tool will be available soon on this page.
- Check & Register: Federal Social Media Accounts, by Justin Herman, HowTo.gov (Apr. 26, 2012). GSA has built a federal social media registry -- a government-wide solution that gives the public a way to verify whether a social media account is official. It also provides a place for agencies to register their accounts centrally so they don't have to build a solution within each agency.
Cool new tool from Sunlight!
Gary Price points out a great new tool for getting alerts on Federal and State Government Info:
- Scout: A New Alerting Tool (Beta) for Fed/State Government Info From Sunlight Labs, by Gary Price, Infodocket (April 25, 2012).
- Scout. Scout is a free service that provides daily insight to how our laws and regulations are shaped in Washington, DC and our state capitols.... Scout allows anyone to subscribe to customized email or text alerts on what Congress is doing around an issue or a specific bill, as well as bills in the state legislature and federal regulations.
Lunchtime Listen: Mike Wash
Mike Wash, currently the chief information officer of the National Archives and Record Administration and previously the Government Printing Office's chief technical officer, is interviewed in this podcast. He speaks with the Library of Congress's Mike Ashenfelder about Wash's work at the GPO and NARA, including the creation of a new GPO digital publication system, Fedsys, and leading NARA closer to the national goal of creating permanent public access to government content.
- Mike Wash, National Archives and Record Administration, Series: Conversations about Digital Preservation, (April, 2012) 57:57 minutes. download MP3.
Can we rely on trying to ‘harvest’ the web?
May 9, 2012 / Leave a comment
Dr. David S.H. Rosenthal, who is Chief Scientist at LOCKSS, and Kris Carpenter Negulescu of the Internet Archive recently organized a workshop on the problems of harvesting and preserving the Web as it evolves from a collection of linked HTML documents to a programming environment whose primary language is Javascript. David and Kris, with help from staff at the Internet Archive, put together a list of 13 problem areas already causing problems for Web preservation:
Read more about this on David's blog:- Harvesting and Preserving the Future Web, by David Rosenthal, DSHR's Blog (May 7, 2012).
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