3 ms·

Except that your shortener service won't last as long as your print issues either. With the original URL there's still the hope that the Wayback Machine is stil

by ynniv 13y ago

Except that your shortener service won't last as long as your print issues either. With the original URL there's still the hope that the Wayback Machine is still maintained and had visited the page. It's a hard problem.

VMG 13y ago
They could simply list the expanded links on the last page of the magazine.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Exactly, or even just issue a yearly book containing the entire mapping. That would save printing since most people probably don't currently care about the expanded form, though in the future they would still be able to look it up in the library system. (They could also start doing this now, while they can't just retroactively add the expanded forms to editions they have already printed.)
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  Does any existing publication do this? Because providing both shortened and full URLs like this sounds like a great (i.e., retrospectively obvious) way to achieve a balance between "UX" of the magazine and longevity.
  - afandian 13y ago
    Yes. CrossRef.org, which is the registration agency for DOIs (digital object identifiers) does this for URLs in basically the entire scholarly publishing industry. This combats link rot by ensuring that the database of metadata is always up-to-date, and with other initiatives.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ynniv 13y ago
  I think this is a great idea. The casual reader will type in the short url (giving the publisher tracking and control), but the expansion will be available long as the print issue survives. This still fails if only an article survives (by clipping, photocopy, etc), but that seems like an acceptable tradeoff. And until it's a common idea it would be helpful to annotate such shortened links so that someone unfamiliar with the publisher will recognize them as having a printed expansion included. Superscript "*" usually refers to a note on that page, so perhaps a superscript ">>"?
  - indrax 13y ago
    If not for copyright, a magazine page could probably store a compressed copy of every cited url. I suppose one might argue that this is an educational use. It's for future academics and has no commercial impact.
lambda 13y ago
Probably best to list both the original URL, and some kind of link that has an archived version (either your own, or from the Wayback Machine). And of course include the date as well. With the date and the original URL, you can always use the Wayback machine or some other archival service like WebCite to attempt to find an archived version. No citation is guaranteed to be readable after a certain amount of time. All citations are merely a reference for identify the resource that you're looking for, and you need to find it yourself in a library or from the publisher. But the publisher may not exist, you may not be able to find libraries with copies, etc. So, you can only do so much. But if you cite the URL and date, and at least one alternative way to access the content like the Wayback Machine or WebCite or your own, you give people a pretty good chance. Perhaps there needs to be a peer-to-peer web citation database that publishers, libraries, and individuals can join. When a book or journal contains a web citation, the publisher archives a copy of that page in their database. When a library or individual buys a book, they can pull the archived copies from the publishers. This will ensure that as long as someone out there who has a copy of the book has also maintained their web citation database and is on the network, you can pull the citations from them. I believe that archiving of publicly available material, as archive.org does and Google's cache does, is considered not to be copyright infringement (as long as it obeys the limits in robots.txt and noarchive meta tags), as it is sufficiently transformative. So this shouldn't be a problem unless someone explicitly requested that the page not be archived, in which case you probably shouldn't rely on it for a citation.
downandout 13y ago
They could easily have a bot that checks for 404's or substantially changed content for each URL in the shortener database, and informs the shortener. When that occurs, they could have the shortener send the user to either a stored snapshot or cached version of the page that they host with a short note explaining that the content of the original link appears to be gone.

by ynniv 13y ago

VMG 13y ago

They could simply list the expanded links on the last page of the magazine.

jlgreco 13y ago
Exactly, or even just issue a yearly book containing the entire mapping. That would save printing since most people probably don't currently care about the expanded form, though in the future they would still be able to look it up in the library system. (They could also start doing this now, while they can't just retroactively add the expanded forms to editions they have already printed.)
telephonetemp 13y ago
Does any existing publication do this? Because providing both shortened and full URLs like this sounds like a great (i.e., retrospectively obvious) way to achieve a balance between "UX" of the magazine and longevity.
- afandian 13y ago
  Yes. CrossRef.org, which is the registration agency for DOIs (digital object identifiers) does this for URLs in basically the entire scholarly publishing industry. This combats link rot by ensuring that the database of metadata is always up-to-date, and with other initiatives.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ynniv 13y ago
I think this is a great idea. The casual reader will type in the short url (giving the publisher tracking and control), but the expansion will be available long as the print issue survives. This still fails if only an article survives (by clipping, photocopy, etc), but that seems like an acceptable tradeoff. And until it's a common idea it would be helpful to annotate such shortened links so that someone unfamiliar with the publisher will recognize them as having a printed expansion included. Superscript "*" usually refers to a note on that page, so perhaps a superscript ">>"?
- indrax 13y ago
  If not for copyright, a magazine page could probably store a compressed copy of every cited url. I suppose one might argue that this is an educational use. It's for future academics and has no commercial impact.

lambda 13y ago

Probably best to list both the original URL, and some kind of link that has an archived version (either your own, or from the Wayback Machine). And of course include the date as well. With the date and the original URL, you can always use the Wayback machine or some other archival service like WebCite to attempt to find an archived version. No citation is guaranteed to be readable after a certain amount of time. All citations are merely a reference for identify the resource that you're looking for, and you need to find it yourself in a library or from the publisher. But the publisher may not exist, you may not be able to find libraries with copies, etc. So, you can only do so much. But if you cite the URL and date, and at least one alternative way to access the content like the Wayback Machine or WebCite or your own, you give people a pretty good chance. Perhaps there needs to be a peer-to-peer web citation database that publishers, libraries, and individuals can join. When a book or journal contains a web citation, the publisher archives a copy of that page in their database. When a library or individual buys a book, they can pull the archived copies from the publishers. This will ensure that as long as someone out there who has a copy of the book has also maintained their web citation database and is on the network, you can pull the citations from them. I believe that archiving of publicly available material, as archive.org does and Google's cache does, is considered not to be copyright infringement (as long as it obeys the limits in robots.txt and noarchive meta tags), as it is sufficiently transformative. So this shouldn't be a problem unless someone explicitly requested that the page not be archived, in which case you probably shouldn't rely on it for a citation.

downandout 13y ago

They could easily have a bot that checks for 404's or substantially changed content for each URL in the shortener database, and informs the shortener. When that occurs, they could have the shortener send the user to either a stored snapshot or cached version of the page that they host with a short note explaining that the content of the original link appears to be gone.