Herbert Van de Sompel

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Towards Robust Hyperlinks for Web-Based Scholarly Communication

As the scholarly communication system evolves to become natively web-based, hyperlinks are increasingly used to refer to web resources that are created or used in the course of the research process. These hyperlinks are subject to reference rot: a link may break or the linked content may drift and eventually no longer be representative of the content intended by the link. The Hiberlink project quantifies the problem and investigates approaches aimed at alleviating it. The talk will provide an insight in the project's findings that result from mining a massive body of scholarly literature spanning the period from 1997 to 2012. It will also provide an overview of components of a possible solution: pro-active web archiving, links with added attributes, and the Memento "Time Travel for the Web" protocol.