#Court cases bibdesk archive#

A recent study has shown that about 50% of URLs cited in US Supreme Court cases no longer work and over 70% of URLs cited in legal journals between 19 go nowhere. Link rot, meaning when URLs cease to point to anything (404вЂ™d), is truly terrifying. Simply вЂnot savingвЂ™ isnвЂ™t the only problem. It is my word against theirs that the statement was on their site. I am an academic who canвЂ™t back up her claim. As far as I can tell they didnвЂ™t publicly acknowledge that this was part of their business strategy until recently. I didnвЂ™t save the page though and *woosh* that claim was gone. ThatвЂ™s a pretty big deal and it related to a market pattern I identified. In other words, going underground and being more secretive about what was passing through their hands. Horror story: during my masters in 2006, I observed that on the SothebyвЂ™s Pre-Columbian Art website the auction house directly stated that they were scaling back public sales in favour of private sales. The present may be your only chance to preserve what you see. Repeat this to yourself: the internet exists only in the present. You can depend on no one but yourself to preserve the information relevant to you. Put simply, if your sources no longer exist, I and everyone else will question if they ever existed. If the material that we draw upon for research or cite to support our assertions disappears, that is basically the crumbling of our foundation. An academic citation shows that we arenвЂ™t just making stuff up, that what we are saying rests on information that rests on information that rests on information, etc. How do you prove that you know what you know? In academia, we do that by citing our sources.

#Court cases bibdesk archive#

Online information will disappear and it is CRITICAL that you archive what you use.