See the last sentence quoted. Most of the scholarly web citations these days are going to databases like JSTOR or Project Muse, for both of which specific URLs are impossible, but every scholar should know where these databases are and how to access them, the same way that every scholar should know how to interpret and find a print journal citation.
I have to agree with MLA's principles. The problem of link rot in web citations in legal decisions is now so acute that a consortium of law libraries have established a web archive, now in beta testing (here's an article about it; there's not much to see at the archive's home page), to establish permanent URLs for cited material by copying it to a URL that won't change.
I approve; various test projects of this kind were already under way a decade ago when I was a law cataloger, and one of my jobs was to maintain the URLs in our catalog database. Once a month I'd run a URL-checker on the entire database, and then hunt down the new addresses for the ones that had changed. This work, which only large law libraries could attempt to undertake at all, was rapidly growing impossibly time-consuming already.
no subject
I have to agree with MLA's principles. The problem of link rot in web citations in legal decisions is now so acute that a consortium of law libraries have established a web archive, now in beta testing (here's an article about it; there's not much to see at the archive's home page), to establish permanent URLs for cited material by copying it to a URL that won't change.
I approve; various test projects of this kind were already under way a decade ago when I was a law cataloger, and one of my jobs was to maintain the URLs in our catalog database. Once a month I'd run a URL-checker on the entire database, and then hunt down the new addresses for the ones that had changed. This work, which only large law libraries could attempt to undertake at all, was rapidly growing impossibly time-consuming already.