Disappearing Legal Materials

Nearly 14 percent, or approximately one in seven, of the online publications archived by the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive between March 2007 and March 2009 have already disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. A similar analysis in 2008 showed that slightly more than 8 percent of archived titles had disappeared from their original URLs, demonstrating a dramatic increase in “link rot,” or inactive URLs, among archived Web content over the past year.

A two year evaluation of the project reports that the libraries participating in the project have archived more than 4,300 digital objects and tracked more than 177,000 visits to the open-access home of The Chesapeake Project’s digital archive collections. Users of the project’s Web site visited from U.S. educational, government, and military institutions, as well as from countries abroad throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

The full project evaluation is available online.