Lessig - Online Archives

Lawrence Lessig on Online Archiving:

Check out webcitation.org — a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there’s a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog (“http://lessig.org/blog”). It then created an archive URL “http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33”. Click [HERE]on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.
Why, you might ask, would you ever want to substitute that long ugly URL for the short and spiffy http://lessig.org/blog? Well first, and most obviously if you’ve ever written something for publication, URLs are not always short and spiffy. Second, the point is to create an archive of a page at a particular moment.

Readers' comments raise issues related to consistency of a page among browsers, as well as to copyright issues, since a page may be archived without the knowledge or consent of the creator of the page.

More on WEBCITE

Technorati Tags: innovation, archiving