It just happened this week. I got an e-mail from a student doing research on the Beat Generation. She’d discovered a site I did a decade ago (or more) using a campus MOO, a text-only virtual world.\u00a0 My “build” in the world was a writer’s space that resembled my vision of a 50s coffee shop in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.<\/p>\n
“RichMOOnd” is long gone but the site about it remains on our server and I guess Google picked it up. The links to Beat-Generation sites have long vanished or moved.<\/p>\n
It’s a common problem, but as I read in The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>, a group of scholarly publishers called CrossRef <\/a>have been working for a decade to solve this problem.\u00a0 Their plan will provide a sort of digital ISBN for publications.<\/p>\n While I love the idea, it won’t help self-published work (such as this blog). What can writers outside the CrossRef imprimatur do?\u00a0 I claimed in a publication a few years ago that the hyperlink is the first new form of punctuation to come along in a while. It contains the sense of multiple conjunctions, depending on context. For the link above, it’s an “and” but in some cases it can be “and\/but” or “and\/or,” depending upon the context and the writer’s intention.<\/p>\n I teach students who are Google-happy to find an academic source for information, preferably one that is archived.\u00a0 Even when a casual source offers well written content, will it still be there in a year? Students often don’t care, since they they their work to be ephemeral, but if a class project endures, employers and prospective employers might want to see the brilliance on display.<\/p>\n Thus I point students to libraries, government sites, and university pages for “hard links” to at least keep the “rot” minimal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It just happened this week. I got an e-mail from a student doing research on the Beat Generation. She’d discovered a site I did a decade ago (or more) using a campus MOO, a text-only virtual world.\u00a0 My “build” in the world was a writer’s space that resembled my vision of a 50s coffee shop … Continue reading Fighting “Link Rot” in Webtexts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1173,1138,1027,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar","category-pedagogy","category-technoculture","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-1f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}