Volume 67, Issue 2 p. 477-479
BRIEF COMMUNICATION

URL decay at year 20: A research note

Fatih Oguz

Fatih Oguz

Department of Library and Information Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 27412 USA

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Wallace Koehler

Wallace Koehler

Department of Library and Information Studies, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA, 31698 USA

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First published: 01 June 2015
Citations: 8

Abstract

All text is ephemeral. Some texts are more ephemeral than others. The web has proved to be among the most ephemeral and changing of information vehicles. The research note revisits Koehler's original data set after about 20 years since it was first collected. By late 2013, the number of URLs responding to a query had fallen to 1.6% of the original sample. A query of the 6 remaining URLs in February 2015 showed only 2 still responding.