WebCite Takes Web Archiving Into Its Own Hands

Scholars and casual readers alike often run into this problem: While reading a story or a paper or a post, you come across a link to external, essential information and, upon clicking through, are greeted with a 404: Not Found.

In one study published in the journal Science, 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months. Another problem is that cited webpages may change, so that readers see something different than what the citing author saw.

Specifically developed with scholarly web citations in mind, the on-demand archiving system WebCite seeks to make this a problem of the past. Using a form on the company’s website or a bookmarklet available through the site, authors, editors, and readers alike can generate a permanent reference URL for any web page. This URL will link to a duplicate of the page, exactly as it appeared on the day of viewing.

While WebCite—a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium—aims to aid in the preservation of scholarly web pages and web content “with the possibility to be cited in the scholarly literature” this function might be just as useful for non-scholarly bloggers and other Internet users who fear the tenuousness of their links. In addition to the bookmarklet and form, bloggers are encouraged to embed a “Cite this page!” button directly into the button farms where Share, Digg, and Email buttons already appear.

WebCite