It’s simple: link-rot affects anyone whose work links to the web. Perma.cc keeps your work safe from it. Get your own account today at Perma.cc!

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I was fortunate to present on Perma.cc at this year’s CALICon conference – “Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction” conference – at American University.

image via Wikipedia

The session was well-attended and with an hour to present I was able to touch on a few different areas:

• The what-and-why of Perma.cc, how it works and how its archives are stored
• Current stats and growth: ~750,000 Perma records created, ~22,000 user accounts and ~225 institutions, and a number of references to Perma.cc in cases and law review articles in Westlaw
• 
• The in-roads we’re making to academic libraries and commercial users, and the challenges we’re finding in getting them onboard
• What’s coming for Perma.cc: batch-link creation (which got an excited response!), Webrecorder code integration, and in an effort to make adoption at academic libraries easier, a new institutional account type that doesn’t require the user to be added to an organization: non-org institutional accounts.

Fantastic feedback and questions from the librarians, technologists and faculty members who attended the talk. Thanks to all!

Some exciting recent appearances of Perma in the wild:

A recent issue of Society of American Archivist’s Archival Outlook featured an article outlining the SAA’s decision to adopt Perma.cc for their book publishing program:

Beginning this year, SAA books will include permalinks for all cited web resources, not just those that have been assigned a DOI or some other permalink.

This is possible because SAA’s book publishing program recently joined forces with perma.cc. SAA’s participation in the service is sponsored by the Digital Public Library of America and we hope it sets a model for other association publishers outside of law journals, for which perma.cc was originally developed.

[…]

When logged in at the perma.cc site, [book author Anthony] Cocciolo sees folders showing sites that have been archived both for his project and for other SAA book projects. This helps him keep track of his own citations and to see what other SAA authors are citing, while also helping editors improve the quality of SAA publications.

…[Graduate assistant Allison] Chomet noted that she was “impressed with how easy it is to use.”

SAA also “recommends that authors use the bookmarklet that perma.cc provides on their website, as a low-barrier way to capture citations. That way, permalinking won’t slow down the writing or editing process, and readers will see exactly what the author saw at the time of writing.”

In other news, President Obama penned a Harvard Law Review article on the President’s role in advancing criminal justice reform. This is the first time a sitting president has written a law review article.

The article includes 226 web citations, each of which include a Perma Link- ensuring readers of the article will have access to archives of the cited webpages, even if the source page changes or is taken down.

We’re excited Perma.cc is proving such an effective tool for the SAA, the HLR and President Obama  to use for preservation and citation! Check out the SAA article in full here, and Pres. Obama’s article here.

Interested in trying out Perma yourself? Create your own account!