Table 1
This table shows the effect of reference rot in a corpus of 6,400 e-theses defended between 2003 and 2010 in five US institutions: Florida State University, University of Notre Dame, Penn State University, Virginia Tech and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. There were 45,982 URIs extracted and tested for link rot and archive status. This shows that 29.3% of URIs are considered safe in term of long-term access, with content available on the live web and in web archives. Of the remainder, 34% of URIs are at risk: although they are live on the web, they are not archived; 18.3% of URIs are preserved but no longer available on the live web; and, finally, 18.4% of URIs are lost for good because they are not on the live web or the web archives.
| On live web | Not on live web | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archived | 29.3% (Safe) | 18.3% (Preserved) | 47.6% |
| Not archived | 34% (At risk) | 18.4% (Lost) | 52.4% |
| Total | 63.3% | 36.7% | 100% |
Figure 1
Example of the robust link syntax for an article21 published by The New Yorker