Bringing life to dead: Role of Wayback Machine in retrieving vanished URLs

Abstract

The paper makes an attempt to examine the decay and half-life of URL citations cited in articles of conference proceedings. The main focus of the paper is to explore the possibilities of recovering inactive URL citations through the Wayback Machine. The study collected a total of 5698 URLs cited in the 1700 articles published in three Indian LIS conference proceedings published during 2001–2010. Results of the study show that only 49.91% (2844 out of 5698) of URL citations remained active whereas the remaining 2854 (50.09%) were found to have vanished. The paper argues that, as the age of URLs increases, the disappearance of URL citations also increases (r = 0.861, p = 0.003). The study also found that there was an increase in the percentage of active URLs from 2844 (49.91%) to 4506 (79.08%) after the recovery of vanished URLs through the Wayback Machine. The average half-life of URLs before the recovery of vanished URLs and after the recovery of vanished URLs was 4.94 and 14.99 years, respectively (t = −6.720, d.f. = 9, p = 0.000).

Keywords

Citation URLs Vanished URLs Wayback Machine

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