[Air-L] Citing inactive websites

[Taylor, Nicholas A.]

Hi Debbie, I can't really speak to citation style requirements, but I can speak to the utility of URLs and access dates. I would definitely encourage you to include the URLs in your citations, even if they're broken. Doing so greatly increases the chances of someone finding the now-unavailable resource, if it happens to exist in a web archive somewhere. Providing the date that you accessed the resource is moreover important because it gives precision in which version of an available archived resource is closest to the one you consulted.



The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is but one of many web archives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives) and may lack content that others have collected. The challenge that is now being addressed is how to make the availability of these scattered archived resources more transparent. Toward this end, researchers at Los Alamos National Labs and Old Dominion University have been working on a web archive discovery mechanism called "Memento." See this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.1112 or this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/hvdsomp/memento-time-travel-for-the-web for more details.



The team has created a couple of (beta-version) browser add-ons that work with Memento-enabled web archives. Their Synchronicity (http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2011/06/2011-06-10-launching-synchronicity.html) add-on watches for 404 errors and then transparently redirects to an archived version of the same URL if it is known to exist in any Memento-enabled web archive. If no such archived version exists, it performs text mining on pages linking to the missing resource to generate precise search keywords to locate it at a possible new location. Another browser add-on, Memento Fox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mementofox/), allows you to move a date slider back to see archived versions of the current page, if any exist.



Hope that helps!



~Nicholas

Nicholas Taylor| Information Technology Specialist | Library of Congress Web Archiving
Phone: (202) 707-3940 | E-mail: ntay at loc.gov<mailto:ntay at loc.gov> | Twitter: @nullhandle