Rotten But Not Forgotten

Abstract

In late 2002 and early 2003, the Serials and ElectronicResources Department of The Ohio State University Libraries collected for correction a total of 864 nonfunctional URLs in bibliographic records for electronic resources on subscription. This paper identifies the types of errors found and reports the proportion of success versus failure to correct the URLs and restore access to the affected titles. Of the URLs examined, 54% were from .gov websites, with the remainder evenly distributed between .edu, .org, .com, and other websites. The high proportion of nonfunctional government (.gov) URLs may be due to the period of collections and might have been affected by the September 11, 2001 attack. Overall, 15% of the affected URLs ultimately did not require changes; 70% required some type of correction; and 14% could not C. Rockelle Strader, formerly Electronic Resources Manager, is currently Assistant Professor and Catalog Librarian,

The continued problem of URL decay: an updated analysis of health care management journal citations

“…This updated study is important because URL decay continues to be an issue of concern to the scholarly community. Numerous calls to remedy the issue have been made [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], including the original study [1], but little is known about the change in URL decay over time in one specific academic discipline. A review of the literature on URL decay finds that most papers on the topic See end of article for supplemental content.…”

“…A review of the literature on URL decay finds that most papers on the topic See end of article for supplemental content. primarily address URL inaccessibility at one snapshot in time [2][3][4][5][6][7], URL inaccessibility at one snapshot in time for a specific discipline (i.e., computer science, information science) [8][9] or a specific journal (i.e., American Political Science Review, Journal of the Medical Library Association) [10][11]. A smaller number of studies have looked at content changes in a sample of URLs [12][13][14][15][16], but no other studies known to the authors of this study have followed a similar methodology to this study by comparing data from a specific discipline over two distinct time periods.…”

URL decay at year 20: A research note

“…It is well established in the professional literature that web documents undergo significant “decay” and change. Most papers address web document inaccessibility (e.g., Hennessey & Ge, ; Rumsey, ; Russell & Kane, ; Strader & Hamill, ; Taylor & Hudson, ; Tyler & McNeil, ; Wagner, Gebremichael, Taylor, & Soltys, ). Relatively few have been concerned with content changes to those documents (e.g., Bar‐Ilan & Peritz, ; Oguz & Koehler, ; Payne & Thelwall, , , ).…”