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Subject:Re: Citing "expired" sources From:"Bill Hall" <bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 9 Jan 2002 12:03:15 +1100
Lisa Wright asked, "How do you cite online resources in general, given that
they can disappear?" Some of the academic web journals who have stated
policy on this seem to resolve the problem by suggesting that you include
the date when you last accessed the link in all of your Web citations.
Additionally, if you are writing your document as a hypertext and want
people to actually be able to access the obsolete site and it has been
archived, you can include a "WayBackMachine" link in your citation (see http://www.alexa.org). I have already used this fairly extensively in a
major hypertext I have been working on for over a year. When I come up with
a dead link, if I can't find a new live path via searching Google for the
document title, I try the WayBack approach with the original (now dead)
link. Only rarely has the source totally disappeared.
Note that there has been some question as to the legal validity of what
Alexa (an Amazon subsidiary associate as I understand) is doing, but at
least so far they seem to have covered themselves by deleting items when
requested to do so by the copyright owner
(http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/02/wayback/print.html), by using
passwords and/or excluding web crawlers.
Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Strategy and Development Group
Tenix Defence
Yarra Tower, World Trade Centre
Melbourne, Vic. 3005, Australia mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com (on leave until 16/2/2001) mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au
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