Link Rot, Content Drift, and Reference Rot

The Internet is a fluid machine and the pages that make up the Web are only representative of the present. Links to web pages from last year, and sometimes even last month, are frequently obsolete. As these references become more common in published works, from law review articles to Supreme Court decisions this breakdown evidence supporting arguments progressively becomes more problematic.

To take a look at the challenges we face and some of the solutions that are available (or being developed), The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore takes a look at the work of Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive in her article “Can the Internet be archived?”

RIMMF 3 now available from The MARC of Quality

Some of you may be familiar with the original "RIMMF," which stands for "RDA in Many Metadata Formats." RIMMF was developed by Deborah and Richard Fritz of The MARC of Quality (TMQ), a library training and consulting firm, as a visualization and training tool for learning RDA. RIMMF 3 was released in early January, and it has come a long way since its first version! It encourages ("forces" is such a harsh word) the cataloger to "think in RDA;" in other words, think about bibliographic data in terms of entities, attributes, and relationships. I have just begun to experiment with RIMMF 3 (http://www.marcofquality.com/wiki/rimmf/doku.php) and its 18 online tutorials (http://www.marcofquality.com/wiki/rimmf3/doku.php?id=examples), created in support of the upcoming "Jane-athon" (http://rdatoolkit.org/janeathon) taking place at ALA Midwinter. TMQ is offering a free RIMMF 3 training webinar on January 20 (register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/2348652857685218306) as preparation for the Jane-athon, but there is no reason why those not attending the Jane-athon cannot also take advantage of this training opportunity. I find that working through the RIMMF 3 tutorials gives me a real, hands-on taste of what cataloging might look like as we transition from MARC to a linked data-based cataloging environment.