Page 20 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

2070 percent of all web links inside academic publications had gone broken. The same thing had happened to 50 percent of U.S. Supreme Court opinions. After six years, nearly fty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked.In another study conducted in 2014 at the Harvard Law School it was reported that “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” (source)Content disappears for many reasons: much is moved to di erent online addresses and be- comes di cult to nd, some is censored, taken down for copyright or legal reasons, some goes down because the author / publisher does not properly maintain his website. Some is lost to malicious attacks, some of it goes o ine because there are no economic resources to maintain it.Furthermore the evolution and changes to le and hardware formats and standards makes it all the more di cult to access, read les and docu- ments that are only 20 to 30 years old (think for example of 5 1⁄4 oppy disks, or about the tons of one inch analog videotape used in television studios until the 80s). How can you read and access all of that stu unless you digitize it?of our content. We don’t know whether they will remain alive, independent or whether they will restrict or charge for accessing content, be bought, closed down, or be controlled by larger entities or even by governments.From this viewpoint, our cultural heritage rests on very shaky pillars, as we let the digital backup strategy and infrastructure put in place bythese social media sharing and content curation platforms dictate the future lifetime of much of our cultural heritage.Linkrot is the rotting of web links that go bad. Its impact is not marginal as di erent studies and research reports indicate that it can account for up to 30% or more of all the documents published online.While the companies we use to collect, publish and curate information today do have interests in making sure none of their data will ever be lost, they do not seem to be driven by human- istic ideals, but rather by what Wall Street and their stakeholders dictate.More than anything, these companies arenot even aware of holding such great cultural responsibility, and therefore they are obviously not worrying about it.In such a situation, how much trust can we place in them as reliable gatekeepers of our cultural heritage?Given the not so remote possibility of a future cataclysmic event, capable of wiping out most of our present-day civilization and technology, there is little hope that whatever survives through it could be accessed and read by future generations or by intelligent beings from other galaxies.But this is where we should put more of our energies, research and attention.Although you may never heard about it, this phenomenon is so big and pervasive that an o cial name has been given to it: Linkrot. It signi es the rotting of web links that go bad to one or more of the reasons listed above.Linkrot impact is not marginal as di erent studies and research reports indicate that it can account for up to 30% or more of all the documents published online.In addition to this, nobody has any certainty about the future of the content sharing platforms where we publish and share muchdueCONTENT CURATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE. CURATION FOR DIGITAL HERITAGE · ROBIN GOODSmart culture. Analysis of digital trends