-- The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive releases its ‘Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation,’ describing size of digital archive, access statistics and ‘link rot’ among archived publications --The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released a comprehensive report evaluating its digital preservation efforts over the past two years.
A joint effort of the Georgetown University Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia, the project was created as a two-year pilot to investigate the feasibility of establishing a collaborative digital archive, shared by multiple institutions in the law library community, for the preservation of Web-published legal materials. The aim of the project is to ensure long-term access to these born-digital publications, which can be easily lost as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time.
The project evaluation reveals that nearly 14 percent, or approximately one in seven, of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2009 have already disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. A similar analysis in 2008 showed that slightly more than 8 percent of archived titles had disappeared from their original URLs, demonstrating a dramatic increase in “link rot,” or inactive URLs, among archived Web content over the past year.
The evaluation also reports that the libraries participating in the project have archived more than 4,300 digital objects and tracked more than 177,000 visits to www.legalinfoarchive.org, the open-access home of The Chesapeake Project’s digital archive collections. Users of the project’s Web site visited from U.S. educational, government, and military institutions, as well as from countries abroad throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
The full project evaluation is available at www.legalinfoarchive.org.
Having successfully completed its initial two-year pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive is currently expanding. Law libraries nationwide are encouraged to join this collaborative digital archive or establish similar preservation initiatives under the auspices of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA).
For more information, visit the LIPA Web site at www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa or The Chesapeake Project at www.legalinfoarchive.org.
