[Air-L] Inclusion of short links in academic publications?

[Joseph Reagle]

On Friday, July 22, 2011, Mark D. Johns wrote:
> While I tend to agree that there is useful information concerning
> sources in the original long URL, link rot is a constant issue
> regardless of whether one uses a shortening service or not.

Yes, but the service can contribute to the rot. When I finished my dissertation in 2008, I did an analysis of ~1000 of my digital sources and found a 2% rot rate -- so soon! [1]

Had I used one of the dominant URL shorteners of the day, Trim, they'd all be dead.

As I mention in [1], I archived the sources myself (with wget) and made that available, all broken down by domain and such, as neat as can be.

[1]: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/digital-posterity.html