data rot

["Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Arts and Letters Daily (http://www.aldaily.com) is one of the most
interesting "publications" on the web, inasmuch as it provides links to
well-chosen articles on a wide variety of cultural/intellectual topics
from around the world, always a handful fresh daily.  It has gone through
metamorphoses since it began in 1998:  once associated with the departed
*Lingua Franca*, now sponsored by the *Chronicle of Higher Education*.

Given that their "content" is all linked from sites of other publications,
they have very low overhead:  the good news.  The bad news may be seen if
you look at their archives.  They began business in September 1998 and
still have the 1998 links all posted on their site.  If you look at the 25
oldest links, you find that 20 of them have gone bad.  That's not to say
that those pieces are lost entirely (they may be available but at
different addresses), but the metadata have gone bad and it would take
assiduous searching to know whether the originals can be found.  In
particular, I am told that the *Lingua Franca* content from that lively
and provocative journal has indeed quite vanished in the wake of the
journal's financially-driven cessation of publication in 2001.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University