The current issue of The New Yorker includes a terrific piece by Jill Lepore on the many exciting developments and challenges in the field of web archiving.
Lepore details the wonderful, pioneering work by Brewster Kahle and our friends at Internet Archive, as well as Herbert Van de Sompel and the Memento team. She also describes the impact Perma.cc aims to make in the world of law reviews and court decisions:
[Perma] was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America. Perma.cc promises “to create citation links that will never break.” It works something like the Wayback Machine’s “Save Page Now.” If you’re writing a scholarly paper and want to use a link in your footnotes, you can create an archived version of the page you’re linking to, a “permalink,” and anyone later reading your footnotes will, when clicking on that link, be brought to the permanently archived version. Perma.cc has already been adopted by law reviews and state courts; it’s only a matter of time before it’s universally adopted as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.
We couldn’t agree more!