re: A preservation experience

["Waters, Donald" <DJW@mellon.org>]

Friends:

Those of you following this thread will be interested to find in the
current issue of Science Magazine a very interesting article, which
reports on an attempt to quantify and evaluate the kind of loss that Jim
O'Donnell experienced.

The reference and article summary is provided below.

Best regards,

Don Waters

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Dellavalle, Robert P., Hester, Eric J., Heilig, Lauren F., Drake, Amanda
L., Kuntzman, Jeff W., Graber, Marla, Schilling, Lisa M. INFORMATION
SCIENCE: Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References Science 2003 302:
787-788.

The use of Internet references in academic literature is common, and
Internet references are frequently inaccessible. The extent of Internet
referencing and Internet reference activity in medical or scientific
publications was systematically examined in more than 1000 articles
published between 2000 and 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine,
The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science. Internet
references accounted for 2.6% of all references (672/25548) and in
articles 27 months old, 13% of Internet references were inactive.
Publishers, librarians, and readers need to reassess policies, archiving
systems, and other resources for addressing Internet reference attrition
to prevent further information loss.

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