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?”