Fighting Link Rot in Webtexts Richmond Writing

Fighting Link Rot in Webtexts Richmond Writing It just happened this week. I got an e-mail from a student doing research on the Beat Generation. Shed discovered a site I did a decade ago (or more) using a campus MOO, a text-only virtual world.   My build in the world was a writers space that resembled my vision of a 50s coffee shop in San Franciscos North Beach neighborhood. 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. Its a common problem, but as I read in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a group of scholarly publishers called CrossRef have been working for a decade to solve this problem.   Their plan will provide a sort of digital ISBN for publications. While I love the idea, it wont help self-published work (such as this blog). What can writers outside the CrossRef imprimatur do?   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, its an and but in some cases it can be and/but or and/or, depending upon the context and the writers intention. I teach students who are Google-happy to find an academic source for information, preferably one that is archived.   Even when a casual source offers well written content, will it still be there in a year? Students often dont 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. Thus I point students to libraries, government sites, and university pages for hard links to at least keep the rot minimal.