Crass Casualty

You will find dead links in Canadian Social Research Links.
And no, thanks, don’t feel you need to inform me about the broken links.

Part of the reason for this is that the site has grown to over 25,000 unique links in almost nine years, and I estimate that nowadays, I could spend at least half of my website work time and efforts fixing broken links. I still do check links on a page-by-page basis as I’m adding new links – I just don’t tackle sitewide linkchecks anymore.

The other part of the reason that I don’t always fix broken links on my site is to shed some light on some Web practices that I consider unsavoury, like revisionism and intential deletion of documents that aren’t otherwise available in print and that are important for historical research.

Governments are particularly bad at dumping website content that predates their administration, as if nothing before their arrival on the scene mattered. Sometimes, site content disappears because of some anachronistic government information retention policy – as if nothing that’s older than five years or whatever could possibly be of any interest to anyone today.

But sometimes “lost” website content is a report or a communiqué that a particular administration released and subsequently yanked because of adverse public reaction, or because it made them look bad in some way. I think there should be some independent authority responsible for ensuring the integrity and permanence of content on government websites.

In the end, though, it’s important for all users to remember that the Web is NOT an electronic library.

To characterize it as such, one would have to assume that the librarian is some weirdo who takes perverse pleasure in relocating books to obscure corners of the library without telling anyone where to find them. Or more precisely, a whole gaggle of librarians constantly moving the contents of the library around whimsically, unfettered by any burden of accountability to the library users…

The point is, Web content is ephemeral by its very nature, and there doesn’t appear to be much of a commitment to its historical significance. Thus, if you find something online that you consider important, my best advice is: don’t just add it to your Favorites or your Bookmarks — SAVE it to your hard drive! (I’m talking *social research Web content* here, but this applies to many other online areas…)

If you find a dead link on this or any other website, and if that link is to something that you should have saved to your computer, here’s something you can try:
1. Select the keyword(s) from the link you were trying to access
2. Go to the home page of the site where the document was located (by deleting everything after the .ca” or “.com” in the URL.)
3. Do a search on that site for the missing file.

If the site itself is no longer online, you can often find a “snapshot” of it [including all of its content] by using the Internet Archive (also known as The Wayback Machine): http://www.archive.org/

If you haven’t visited archive.org before, you may find it *very* interesting, as I did…

If you want some background about my website and newsletter, go to the Home Page:
http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/

…and click on: About this site – Who’s doing this – …and why? near the top of the page.

I launched the site in late 1997, and it’s been a labour of love ever since – one that’s been getting out of hand for some time now.

The site started as a hobby, with about 1,600 “welfare-related” links that I’d collected and classified under each Canadian jurisdiction and about a dozen “theme” pages. Now, almost nine years later, a general sense of chaos reigns supreme, with over 25,000 links distributed among over 65 theme links and over 300 pages in all. I don’t have the time anymore to check each and every one of my pages for linkrot (dead links) on a monthly basis – and, truth be told, sometimes I *want* to highlight the disappearance of links , or more precisely the disappearance of some Web content, because it’s tantamount to yanking a book from the library bookshelves and saying it doesn’t exist anymore.
[But that's a whole other blog - later.]
The site started as a way for me to share my collection of bookmarks with other social researchers, and the newsletter was born some four years later as the result of a work colleague’s suggestion to “keep us informed by e-mail when we can’t visit your site regularly”. Now, in the fall of 2006, I realize that I’ve flipped a full 180 degrees — now, the newsletter is my preferred medium, and the site is the chaotic repository for all of the links that I share in the newsletter.

I’m curious to know whether regular visitors to my site and subscribers to my newsletter have a strong preference for either product – not that I ‘d even consider stopping either, but just to get a sense of whether my efforts should be more on site maintenance or on the newsletter. This blog is an experiment, but it’s one that I find weirdly empowering – weird in the sense that for almost nine years, my only “voice” was the occasional rant or aside in a newsletter. Now I can speak to you directly, and (the scary ongoing evaluation part…) you can comment on my posts.

So where do we go from here?

All comments and suggestions are welcome…

Gilles