Taking on link rot: Harvard Library Innovation Lab’s Perma.cc

Brown Bag with Kim Dulin, Harvard Law Library

Event date June 24, 2015 12pm - 1pm
photo of Kim DullinLocation: E25-401

Perma.cc is a web archiving platform and service developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) to help combat link rot. Link rot occurs when links to websites point to web pages whose content has changed or disappeared. Perma.cc allows authors and editors to create permanent links for citations to web sources that will not rot. Upon direction from an author, Perma.cc will retrieve and save the contents of a cited web page and assign it a permanent Perma.cc link. The Perma.cc link is then included in the author’s references. When users later follow those references, they will have the option of proceeding to the website as it currently exists or viewing the cached version of the website as the creator of the Perma.cc link saw it. Regardless of what happens to the website in the future, the content will forever be accessible for scholarly and educational purposes via Perma.cc.

Discussant: Kim Dulin is Associate Director for Collection Development and Digitization at the Harvard Law School Library, and directs the Harvard Library Innovation Lab.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consists of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.