Periodic Fable

One of the problems with citing online sources is that often Web archiving is still in its infancy. In the area of the arts which I have done a lot of work in, creative sites often disappear because of the shortsighted and underfunded nature of projects – putting a website up for as little as a year and then it disappears. The same is true of school sites, blogs, and most annoying of all for academics, articles papers put online in various ways by researchers and writers. That dreaded 404 comes up just when you’ve referred 150 students to it…

The following services help to solve this problem, and may also be useful if the worst happens and your own website disappears as a result of server failure, backup error or some other problem.

• WebCite: an archiving system for web references (cited webpages and websites): they generate a reference which contains – in addition to the original live URL – a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when accessing the cited material.
• Furl: From LookSmart, this service acts as an archiving tool as well as a bookmarking service. It creates caches of bookmarked pages, and enables users to organise ‘favorites’ or bookmarks by using tags. See also MyWeb by Yahoo!.
• The Internet Archive: or the Wayback machine – this wonderful Web archive caches pages automatically and keeps a regular archive of most of the Web.
• Google cache: if a page has disappeared quite recently, then searching for it in Google will provide, as well as the original (now dead) link, a “cached” version.

This also means, however, that you can never be sure that you have deleted content on the web. But that’s a subject for another blog entry…