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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary

July 26, 2011 / Leave a comment

Here is an interesting story about preserving British government information.

Bernard M. Scaife, Technical Services Librarian at the University of London Institute of Education, writes about dealing with the broken links in their catalogue. Finding that ten percent of the links to external resources in their bibliographic records referred to documents which no longer existed and that many of those were official publications from government departments, he started looking for a way to eradicate their link rot problem. Since they already had Eprints software running on campus, they decided to use it:
It occurred to us that this software could enable us to eradicate our link rot problem, whilst building in a core level of digital preservation and increasing the discoverability of these documents. We were convinced that a citation which linked to a record in a Web archive was far more likely to survive than one which did not.
They knew that government budget cuts were increasing the risk of losing content from government departments. The article describes their experiences and summarizes what they learned:
  • Placing files in a repository gives digital preservation to key documents in the subject field and eradicates the link rot problem.
  • Adding high-quality metadata enhances the resource and allows it to hold its head high and become an integral part of a library's collection.
  • A specialist library can play an important role in preserving domain-specific government content as part of its long-term strategy and ensure high-quality resources remain available.
  • Provided you are prepared to get to grips with its complexity, the EPrints software is well suited to the task and provides good interoperability with other legacy systems for importing metadata
  • The added value of being able to search the full text provides a potentially very rich resource for data mining whether by current or future researchers of educational history. Continue reading →

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Sometimes even the live links are dead (or languishing)

July 2, 2011 / Leave a comment

Readers of FGI are well acquainted with link rot, where internet links break over time. Today I'd like to talk about something more subtle with no obvious way to detect the problem. On the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I had a link to APOC InfoQuick, a database of disclosure information for public officials and lobbyists from the Alaska Public Offices Commission. Today I visited the link at https://webapp.state.ak.us/apoc/index.jsp and chose the "lobbyist reporting" menu item because I thought it would be fun to list BP lobbyists in a personal blog entry I was drafting. The lobbyist reporting section had a Search Lobbyist Registrations link. I clicked on it, searched for BP and got some listings. But only from 2007, the first year that Sarah Palin was Governor. Searches in other parts of the lobbyist reporting system confirmed that NO information was available after 2007. I started to wonder if I'd missed the session law that repealed lobbying reporting requirements. Then I noticed that the URL started with "webapp" and thought that it might be good to see if this database was still linked from the APOC home page. It wasn't. Now they had a link called "search reports" at http://doa.alaska.gov/apoc/SearchReports/index.html. The page features two reporting systems for public officials - An "interim reporting system" for reports filed 2010 and later and "searchable campaign reporting" which is the public official/candidate portion of APOC InfoQuick. This explains why APOC InfoQuick wasn't taken off the live web. Current information on lobbyists in Alaska is still available, just not database searchable. You can access various PDF lobbyist reports from 2005 forward at http://doa.alaska.gov/apoc/TrainingReports/lobbyist.html. I have no information on why lobbyist information is no longer database searchable and speculating why would take me out of my comfort zone of not discussing policy choices made by the level of government I work for. The main point I'm making is that most librarians and other information specialists are pretty comfortable with link checking and fixing broken links when we find them. But what can we do when a site remains on the web but has stopped being updated? Especially when there's no note on the old site about the change? Continue reading →

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Pinboard report on link rot

May 29, 2011 / Leave a comment

A new report on link rot on the blog of the social bookmarking service Pinboard:

Using a random sample of 300 URLs stored in Pinboard for each year 1997-2011 (based on the year the bookmark was created), Ceglowski says "you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years." Ceglowski also shows year by year lists and the raw data. In my quick look: of the 47 .gov web sites checked over the entire period 7 were not found (status code 404) and 7 had internal server errors (status code 500) for a 29.7% link rot rate. Hat tip to INFOdocket! Continue reading →

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New Link Rot Report

April 25, 2011 / Leave a comment

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. In an examination of "link rot" the project found that 30.4% of URLs examined no longer provide access to their original information. This study is particularly relevant to government information specialists because more than 90% of their sample URLs were from state governments (state.[state code].us), organizations (.org), and government (.gov) the top-level domains. The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive, which harvests and preserves relevant digital legal information from the web, has been producing reports on "link rot" for several years. They define link rot as "a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Group's digital archive." Their new report is now available:

In one interesting finding, the report says that the rate of loss of information slowed in the last year: "Whereas the prevalence of link rot among URLs in the sample nearly doubled every year during the first three years of the study, it slowed significantly in the fourth year." The report makes clear that although 30.4 percent, or nearly one-third, of the archived titles have disappeared from their original URLs since the beginning of the program in 2007, only 2.5 percent of URLs were lost to link rot within the past year. Their data show that cumulative link rot frequency for .gov files was 10% in 2008, 13% in 2009, 25% in 2010, and 31% in 2011. There was an interesting development in that some state-level URLs that were inaccessible in 2010 were once again accessible when re-checked for the 2011 analysis. The cumulative link rot frequency for state level URLs was still almost as high as for the federal URLs: 10.8% in 2008, 15.8% in 2009, 32.1% in 2010, and 30.4% in 2011. Even with that slight improvement at the state level, the overall cumulative link rot percentage rose in 2011 (30.4%) over 2010 (27.9%). Another way of looking at this is that of the documents the Chesapeake Project has preserved, only 69.6% were still available at their original URL as of the 2011 study. In an earlier study, the authors qualified their findings, noting that the findings are "not meant to be broadly applicable or to provide a representation of link rot throughout the universe of web resources" but only reports on those items in the Chesapeake Project archive. The studies do provide "insight into the vulnerability of law- and policy-related web resources selected by experienced law librarians from seemingly stable open-access web sites hosted by reputable organizations and state and federal governments." Significantly, "All of the Web resources described in this report that have disappeared from their original locations on the Web remain accessible via permanent archive URLs here at legalinfoarchive.org, thanks to the Chesapeake Group's efforts. " Continue reading →

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2011 Report on Link Rot

March 2, 2011 / 2 Comments on 2011 Report on Link Rot

How reliable are those URLs in your OPAC? The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive which harvests and preserves relevant digital information from the web, has been producing reports on "link rot" for several years. They define link rot as "a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project's digital archive." Their new report is now available:

This study is particularly relevant to government information specialists because more than 90% of their sample URLs were from state governments (state.[state code].us), organizations (.org), and government (.gov) the top-level domains. Their data show that link rot frequency for .gov files was 10% in 2008, 13% in 2009, and 25% in 2010. State-level URL link rot was even worse: 10.8% in 2008, 15.8% in 2009, and 32.1% in 2010. The authors qualify their findings, noting that the study is "not meant to be broadly applicable or to provide a representation of link rot throughout the universe of web resources" but only reports on those items in the Chesapeake Project archive. It also says, however, that the study provides "insight into the vulnerability of law- and policy-related web resources selected by experienced law librarians from seemingly stable open-access web sites hosted by reputable organizations and state and federal governments." Significantly, "none of the content analyzed in this study has been truly lost; all of the content has been preserved in a digital archive" at The Chesapeake project. Continue reading →

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