Rot at the Top

We often hear complaints about the difficulty of finding resources on the World Wide Web, but a couple of experiences recently have alerted me to the danger of valuable web documents "going missing" because they've been re-named or moved.

In December, I was editing a report of a talk given two years ago to the BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group. Our speaker, Geoff Ryman, formerly worked in the section of the Cabinet Office called "the Office of the e-Envoy". With his colleagues, Geoff wrote some excellent "Guidelines for UK Government Websites" published in 2002 and revised in 2003. They were made available as a printed book from TSO, but also electronically for free as a series of PDF files.

Geoff had given us a URL where this useful resource could be found, in the resources subsection of "http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk".  As I wrote up Geoff's talk, I checked all references, including this URL. It no longer existed; the Guidelines seemed lost.  I searched on Google: I still couldn't find them, but what I did find was hundreds of links from Websites all around the world that likewise thought this useful government publication worth linking to.  But all those links were broken...

It seems that the Office of the e-Envoy was disbanded in August 2004, whereupon its Web site was taken down and bundled into an archive site of the Cabinet Office. It was done in such a crude way that most of the internal links in the e-Envoy site were broken and can't be followed.

Hardly a shining example of "joined-up e-Government", is it?

The phenomenon of hyperlink breakages on the Web is sometimes called "linkrot" and one expects and tolerates a certain amount of it, especially from those parts of the Web maintained by amateurs and enthusiasts who come and go. But when Government agencies or learned societies have so little regard for their own intellectual resources that they allow whole archives to avalanche from one URL to another, it's rather shocking.

Only last week I met the same problem. This time the guilty party was the British Computer Society. I wanted to link to an article on the BCS Web site, as reading material for a seminar. Having linked to it over a year ago, I already had the URL - or so I thought.  In the meantime, the BCS had renamed the file, and placed it in a different directory. I managed to track it down using the BCS's search engine. But when I checked with the BCS webmaster, I was told that the URL was about to change yet again as a result of the recent site redesign!

Valuable Web resources deserve to have persistent URLs. There is a technical fix of sorts - it is called the Digital Object Identifier system (see www.doi.org) and assigns a unique tracking code to each registered "object of intellectual property", rather like a book's ISBN.  But no technical solution to linkrot can succeed unless organisations value their assets and people's reliable access to them. Ultimately, I think, it's about whether you care or not.

PS: Geoff Ryman's talk can be found here: http://www.epsg.org.uk/meetings/access2003/ryman.html. I promise!

Conrad Taylor:  Information design & electronic publishing
Secretary, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (www.epsg.org.uk )

Back to top