Cooking Up a Solution to Link Rot

The following is a guest post by the Law Library’s managing editor, Charlotte Stichter. When Charlotte is not at her day job she loves to cook, and is currently on a quest to find the perfect recipe for clafouti.

Vivian Jarrell's canned goods, produced from her garden, including tomato juice, pickles, grape juice, and beans. (Photo by Terry Eiler, 1997) (Source: Coal River Folklife Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.tec03805) — Vivian Jarrell’s canned goods, produced from her garden, including tomato juice, pickles, grape juice, and beans. (Photo by Terry Eiler, 1997) (Source: Coal River Folklife Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.tec03805)

For those with vivid imaginations, the terms “link rot” and “reference rot” might conjure images of moldy fruit in the back of the office refrigerator or a pungent bag of something unidentifiable pulled from under a car seat weeks after its “use by” date. But the food analogy can only go so far. What the terms are really referring to is the all-too-common problem of hyperlinked web addresses — in legal and academic writing or on web pages, for example — that fail to lead the reader to the consumable content desired, either beca