Robust Linking to Web Resources

Robust Linking to Web Resources
@mart1nkle1n
DtMH 2017, 11/15/2017, San Francisco, CA
http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/
Martin Klein
@mart1nkle1n
Research Library
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Acknowledgements:
Herbert Van de Sompel, LANL
Harihar Shankar, LANL
Michael L. Nelson, ODU
Mark Graham, Internet Archive

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Slide by Herbert Van de Sompel, 2017
A Managed Collection Desires Reliable Outlinks

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Links to another Managed Collection

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Links to Web at Large Resources

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Link Rot

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https://web.archive.org/web/20140101072007/http://netpreserve.org/general-assembly/2013/overview
IIPC
2013

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http://netpreserve.org/general-assembly/2013/overview
IIPC
today

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Content Drift

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https://web.archive.org/web/20161228184110/https://www.epa.gov/climatechange
EPA
12/2016

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https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/signpost/cc.html
EPA
today

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• On the web, all links are subject to reference rot
• Reference rot hinders our ability to follow links as they were
intended when they were put in place
• Link rot: a link stops working all together
• Content drift: The linked content changes over time and
may eventually no longer be representative of the
content that was originally linked
Problem

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0167475
Reference Rot in Scholarly Communication

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Link Rot in Scholarly Articles

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Link Rot in Scholarly Articles

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Reference Rot Over Time - arXiv

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• On the web, all links are subject to reference rot
• Reference rot hinders our ability to follow links as they were
intended when they were put in place
• Link rot: a link stops working all together
• Content drift: The linked content changes over time and
may eventually no longer be representative of the
content that was originally linked
How can we:
1. Make links more robust?
2. Make them actionable for humans and machines?
Problem

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Robust Links

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Robust Links
1. Create a snapshot of referenced resources in a public web
archive

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Why multiple archives? They aren’t magic web sites!
They’re just web sites.
If you used Mummify, you’re now left with a bunch of defunct, shortened links like:
https://mummify.it/XbmcMfE3
Slide by Michael L. Nelson, 2016

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Robust Links
1. Create a snapshot of referenced resources in a publically available
web archive
2. Decorate links with:
• URI of archived snapshot
• datetime of archiving
• resource’s original URI

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Link Decoration with Standard HTML
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20171108053054/http://sfgov.org/"
data-originalurl="http://sfgov.org/"
data-versiondate="2017-11-08">
City and County of San Francisco</a>
http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/spec

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Link Decoration via API
http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/api/json/http://web.archive.org/web/20171108053054/http://sfgov.org/
• Submit URI of an archived
snapshot
• Retrieve Robust Links
HTML snippet
• Copy and paste into your
application
http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/api/json/{URI-of-archived-snapshot}

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Robust Links
1. Create a snapshot of referenced resources in a publically available
web archive
2. Decorate links with:
• URI of archived snapshot
• datetime of archiving
• resource’s original URI
Benefits:
• Can visit archived, immutable version of referenced resource
• Original URI & capture datetime allow finding versions in other
web archives
• Uniform, machine-actionable

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Robust Links for Machines
1. JavaScript
2. Browser extensions
a. Memento for Chrome
b. IA Chrome Extension

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Robust Links in Action - JavaScript
http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/november2015-vandesompel

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Robust Links in Action - JavaScript
http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/november2015-vandesompel

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Robust Links in Action – Memento for Chrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/memento-time-travel/jgbfpjledahoajcppakbgilmojkaghgm

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Robust Links in Action – Memento for Chrome
http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/demo/uri_references.html

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Robust Links in Action – IA Chrome Extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak

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Take-Aways
• Links on the web are subject to reference rot
• “Robustifying” them (manually or via API calls) can help alleviate the
problem
• Link decorations as proposed by Robust Links are
• based on HTML standards
• machine-actionable
• Organizations such as the Internet Archive, Wikipedia,
News Publishers can help with adoption

Robust Linking to Web Resources

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