Analyzing the Persistence of Referenced Web Resources with Memento

TL;DR

This study analyzes the persistence and archival status of web resources cited in scholarly papers from arXiv and UNT, revealing significant resource loss and emphasizing the need for better archiving practices.

Contribution

It presents the largest automated analysis of referenced web resource persistence across two repositories, highlighting differences based on repository type and content.

Findings

45% of arXiv URLs still exist but are not archived

28% of UNT URLs have been lost

Automated processing of over 160,000 URLs

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content, has a bearing on the availability of the web resources cited by that content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the referenced URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45% (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28% of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.