flux in URL's: Was ...Proper Subject line / ..."newbies"

[R124C41 at aol.com]

>All Hail! 
>Anyone want to see my questions and help direct me to the >answers?

Well, maybe I am being set up but I'll take a stab at it.  

I remember when we are all new at this technology and it was the fact that we
were all new that made it easy to get started becoming an expert (hah, hah).
 It would be nice to keep the slope of the on-ramp small enough that people
could still get going...it seems too much effort to start a
web4lib4newbies...
It's kind of like helping the third or fourth child with his/her homework
assignment...boring but important to do...

>Question:
>The flux in url's?
>etc.

I can report that in a year's time I have seen the references in a paper I
wrote become obsolete because of changes in the organization of our own web
server.

If they had been significant changes (like major content revisions), then
maybe I wouldn't mind but they were just structural revisions to adapt the
server to new maintainers and a new way of thinking.

It would have been nice if my paper's reference could have retained some
validity.

So, whether it's migration to WWW (from gopher, I presume) or
storage changes (new disks) or retrieval changes (not sure what is meant
here) or the authors porting to new places so to speak (perhaps I could
register the URL of my personal home page?) or whatever, it would be a nice
feature.

Question is the cost and who's going to pay for it...does anyone have or know
of someone who has a personal, "for-life", telephone number (was that area
code 700 or was it the 600 club--there's an idea--maybe one religious
organizations could use this as a fund raising -- that of providing a
immortal URL -- for a certain contribution...then we could inherit URL's and
do geneology on them....but I digress...

As for Universities, Businesses, Personal service providers, and other
Overlap), I think that all those orgs will have some objects on the net for
which they wish enduring permanence and others will just be very transient...

--David Ritchie
--Naperville, IL
--R124C41 at AOL.COM