Why college libraries — and books — are far, far from dead
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Harvard University professor and librarian Robert Darnton tells the Chronicle of Higher Education why books and paper archives are still important in the digital age:
Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, calculated in 1997 that the average life of a URL was 44 days.
Only 44 days? Now that's some link rot.
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(I'm sure that has lengthened in the past decade or so, though from my own experience in curating stories, some posts' expiration dates -- usually those from local and regional newspapers -- are still tragically short.)
And is digital information truly eternal, as one hears so often?
Heh -- hardly, he says:
... Most of the information that once did appear has probably been lost.
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