[seqfan] article in Nature about link rot

[Neil Sloane]

Dear Seq Fans,

the May7 2015 issue of Nature
has an article about Link Rot (which
of course is a major problem for us, see below), and ways that people are
trying to solver it

Here are some key parags from the article:

online archiving services, such as the Internet Archive, make it possible
for researchers to store permanent copies of a web page as they see it when
preparing their manuscripts — a practice Van de Sompel recommends. He urges
researchers to include their cached link and its creation date in their
manuscripts (or for publishers to take a snapshot of referenced material
when articles are submitted). The Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, has developed a web-archiving service called Perma.cc (
https://perma.cc): enter a hyperlink here and the site spits back a new
hyperlink for a page that contains links to both the original web source
and an archived version.

Van de Sompel and others have in the past few weeks rolled out a
complementary approach. It relies on a service that Van de Sompel has
co-developed called Memento, which he dubs “time travel for the web”. The
Memento infrastructure provides a single interface for myriad online
archives, allowing users access to all of the saved versions of a given web
page. This infrastructure could potentially allow access to web-at-large
links in any scholarly article, even if the linked sites go down.
Publishers would have to incorporate a small piece of extra computer code
in their articles, and the standard single weblinks would have to be
replaced with three pieces of information — the live link, a cached link
and its creation date — all wrapped in Van de Sompel's proposed
machine-readable tags.

I didn't really understand the article - can we use any of these ideas?

The OEIS has about 220,000 links, of which 82,000 are to b-files, 33,000
are links to the Index to the OEIS, and the remaining 103,000 are links to
the web.  Presumably somewhere between 25% and 40% of these
links are broken


Best regards
Neil

Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
Email: njasloane at gmail.com