The Internet Archive announced today a new service — creating a permalink for a web page that leads to copy of the page at the Internet Archive. So, for example, I just created a permanent snapshot of this blog’s homepage as of 25 October 2013 at 19:35.43, preserved forever and fully citable: http://web.archive.org/web/20131025193543/http://www.rss4lib.com/
This blog probably doesn’t deserve that sort of immortality. But what about more significant things? Rather than citing a web page with a note “accessed on 25 October 2103”, let the Internet Archive grab a snapshot of it and link to that. It would be lovely if this service could be extended into licensed content so that citations to academic (and all-too-often behind a pay wall based on one’s affiliation with the library’s parent institution) content could be equally persistent.
Scholarly content, as a rule, is provided through a non-persistent URL, if we ignore DOIs and Handles. Those valuable tools, of course, are only good as long as the owner of the content maintains their persistence. The owner of the content is responsible for updating destination links. That may not be the highest priority in a bankruptcy or other sudden and unexpected cessation of operations.
This new service makes possible better back-references to the historical record.