Hi! I work on Perma.cc at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. For what it's worth, the way I think about permanence as a lawyer and programmer is that nothing

Hi! I work on Perma.cc at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. For what it's worth, the way I think about permanence as a lawyer and programmer is that nothing is really permanent. We have court decisions from hundreds of years ago, for example, but we might easily lose them in the next apocalypse. We've lost lots of records of equal value already. (For a great example, check out the fire-damaged Jefferson collection at the Library of Congress -- there are many published books from Thomas Jefferson's personal library that, once they were lost, could never be replaced.) The reason we've kept court decisions as long as we have is that we make lots of copies, and keep them in lots of libraries, and libraries care about hanging on to things. But court decisions now cite to random web pages all the time, and the halflife of a URL is like 18 months. So with Perma we're opening up law library shelves to web pages as well as court decisions -- allowing law review, courts, and others to say, "this web page is culturally important enough for me to cite to, so please hang onto it." To me this is the magical weirdness of the internet -- no one has ever quite had this level of write access to library shelves. This has made a huge difference for web preservation in the legal field in a short period of time -- we now have over half of American law schools signed on to use Perma, several US government agencies, and nine state supreme courts with more on the way. On the backend we're building out a private LOCKSS network that will put those records in the hands of lots of libraries. (We're hiring for this, by the way -- drop me a line if you're in Boston.) We can't prove that any of those libraries will still be around in a few decades, but we think it's a good bet. Happy to answer any questions ...