A recent New York Times article
has highlighted a topic that has been of recent interest to law
libraries and legal scholars: link rot in legal citations. The article
addresses a forthcoming study by Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Law
and Computer Science at Harvard, Larry Lessig, a professor of Law and
Leadership at Harvard, and Kendra Albert, a Harvard law student. The
study looks specifically at link rot in U.S. Supreme Court opinions,
finding that nearly 50% of the links in Supreme Court opinions no longer
work. The study also looked at link rot in law journals, including the
Harvard Law Review. Professor Zittrain discusses the study in a recent post on his blog and provides a link to the study on SSRN.
Law libraries, who have long had an interest in this topic (see a recent article here
by law librarians Raizel Liebler and June Liebert in the Yale Journal
of Law and Technology), are becoming more involved than ever in
addressing link rot in legal citations. Zittrain's blog discusses a new
project called Perma.cc, which is a
project undertaken by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and a number of
academic law libraries. According to Zittrain, the project "will allow
those libraries on direction of authors and journal
editors to store permanent caches of otherwise ephemeral links."
(As an aside, the New York Times article mentions the recent book
by Richard A. Posner titled "Reflections on Judging." The Law Library
has recently received this book as part of its collection. See the
library's catalog for more information.)
(This entry was originally written and posted by Sarah Kammer)
No comments:
Post a Comment