But it used to be here....


It can happen in a library as well. We find a reference in an article we're reading and decide to look it up, only to discover that the issue of the magazine in which the article appears isn't on the shelf, or the book has been misplaced, or for some reason can't be found. Over the World Wide Web it's doubly distressing, probably because our expectation is that one click will bring us straight to what we want, and instead we get a screen telling us that it couldn't be found. We feel helpless, and somewhat deceived.

In the preparation of the review of the relevant literature of this project I encountered this linkrot numerous times, sometimes when searching for an article that seemed to be worth reading, and others when I wanted to take another look at something I'd read long before. The second phenomenon is, of course, the most distressing. It's as though your memory is playing tricks on you. It's bad enough to misplace something and not be able to find it again. Finding a link that's supposed to lead you to the desired material, either from a web page or from your own bookmarks, and discovering that instead it only leads to a "File Not Found" page is almost an offense to the promise of the internet.

But as much as we might try to avoid being ourselves perpetrators of this linkrot phenomenon, sometimes it simply can't be done. Web sites sometimes cease to exist, and with them the material they contain. And few of us have the time to waste checking what we've written long ago in order to verify that the links we put into that document are still active. A number of hours that I didn't really have to waste have been devoted to trying to track down links which seem to have disappeared. Sometimes I'm even successful and can actually correct the original HTML, while at other times I have to choose between changing the original so that it won't refer to a no longer existent page, or ignoring the problem and hoping that nobody is going to notice.

It's hard to tell whether or when a page that I link to is going to disappear, but some seem to have more potential than others. In cases such as this I've tried to copy the page and post that copy on the Boidem site, linking both to it and to the original, so that I can perhaps avoid this distressing phenomenon.

But of course it's more than just a distressing phenomenon. After all, what makes me feel uncomfortable about having links on the Boidem pages that lead to no-longer existent web pages is the fact that they might reflect on me. Thus my attempt to avoid this phenomenon, the method of online copying that has developed in these column, is a sign of how I view this entire project. As I have come to see it as more than just "an occasional column", but instead as a project that continues to grow and change, and reflect not only my observations on various topics, but perhaps first and foremost, reflect me, I've had to seek out means to demonstrate an awareness of the precariousness of web existence, and find ways to deal with it.


Go to: What a difference a da... makes, or
Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium