Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

404 Reasons To Use Perma.Cc, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

A 2013 study found that 70% of URLs in law journal articles and 50% of URLs cited by U.S. Supreme Court cases had suffered from reference rot and additional studies have demonstrated that reference rot increases over time. Information published online by government agencies is not immune to this phenomena. One startling example is the removal of climate change information from the Environmental Protection Agency's website. Perma.cc is a service developed by the Harvard Innovation Lab to preserve web-based content cited by scholars and the courts. Unlike archiving techniques that rely on random captures of web content, Perma.cc creates a …