Perma.cc - How Law Libraries are Saving the World from Link Rot

Websites change, go away and are taken down. But that doesn't stop courts and scholars of all types from citing, increasingly, to online sources in their work. The pervasive problem that results is called "link rot." See Jonathan Zittrain et al., Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations, 127 Harv. L. Rev. F. 176 (2014), archived at http://perma.cc/4BLV-W28N. We believe law libraries can be a big part of the cure through Perma.cc, a web application developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which has archived almost 20,000 links since launching in September 2013. We hope to lead an engaging discussion about the technology that powers Perma, the experience of building Perma inside a law library, and the strategy for ensuring it lives forever.