[Air-l] Using Online Citations to Defunct Web Sites

[Bunz, Ulla K]

Ken Friedman brings up an important, related issue to giving reference to
online citations (first posted by Ed Lamoureux). What if the website itself
IS the object of inquiry?

I am just now finishing up research that investigated nine entire websites
(not pages). I cannot possibly be required to print out every page in these
sites in case someone wants to look at it 10, 20, 50 years from now, can I? 

As part of my research process and methodology, I downloaded the websites
using WebCopier, and uploaded them on a local server. I did this more to
prevent the sites from changing throughout the research process than to save
them into all eternity. So, theoretically, I could point people to my local
server address and ask them to look at the sites there (at least until I
change university affiliation this summer, and who knows whether I'll "pack"
these digital belongings and take them with me). And the original sites may
have changed since I downloaded them! By definition, websites are dynamic
documents. A screen shot or printout is just a momentary, Polaroid-like
memorabilia. And in a way, so are my downloaded sites.

If quoting text or a paragraph from an online document, I would strongly
support Joe Walther's viewpoint (paraphrased) - to provide up-to-date
specific reference, if at all possible. But if we're talking about whole
pages or sites - I honestly don't know. 

Once I figure it out, I'll write a book and make big bucks from it ;) 
ulla
*************************
Ulla K. Bunz
University of Kansas
102 Bailey
Lawrence, KS 66045
785-864-1160
ulla at ukans.edu
*************************

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	jeremy hunsinger [] 
Subject:	Re: [Air-l] Using Online Citations to Defunct Web Sites

Ken Friedman wrote:
>
> When the Web site itself is the object of inquiry, I print out
> images of the relevant pages. 

while this is a tactic that one can use, I think it really is a waste of 
resources to a great extent.  I do not support the effort of making 
personal copies of everything on the web that people use or cite. 
 Memory is cheap, that is true, effort is not, parsing data and 
knowledge is not, etc.  I'd much prefer to rely on large archives, and 
if something disappears, as things do, books disappear and so do 
articles, they get lost, they will either reappear eventually somewhere 
or they will be traces of what was.  [snip]