"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is an old management adage. Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University helps us with the measurement part in her recent journal article Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability (Law Library Journal vol. 102 no. 4). Sarah reports her analysis of link rot data based on a sample from the archive of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, a "collaborative digital preservation program established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information currently available in digital formats on the World Wide Web."
Due to the nature of the archive, "more than 90% of the top-level domains in the sample were state government (state.[state code].us), organization (.org), or government (.gov) URLs, representing approximately 41%, 32%, and 17% of the sample, respectively." The archived materials are predominantly PDFs. Among her findings: The state government, .org, and .gov domains were the leaders in link rot, with state government outpacing them all.
As Sarah explains, the Chesapeake Group's archive is highly selective and not representative of Web archives in general. For details on the definitions and methodology used for this study, see the full article.
[h/t @richards1000]
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