URLs: Mean time of survival?

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

Dear Mr Thayer,

   thanks for your mail via Web4Lib (BTW: my email-address 
is: kuhn at mpg-gv.mpg.de - irrespective of any terrible 
things my [or anybod else's] nasty mailer may do to my headers ...).


> >    Does anyone know about any statistical information
> > on the "mean time of survival" of URLs and electronic
> > documents on the web in relation to a) type of ressource,
> > b) status of author, c) subject?
> 
> 
> Alas no, but I have a purely anecdotal opinion from nearly 2 years spent
> running RomanSites-L (for info about RomanSites-L, see end of message),
> which involves visiting maybe an average of 100 sites a day, i.e., maybe
> 500 or 600 pages=URLs a day:
> 
> 1. Within the narrower field of "things relevant to Roman antiquity", I've
> noticed almost *no* correlation with any of the 3 items above, with the
> single exception of students and academic years or the end of their
> university career. Even then, good sites get kept at the same URL -- by
> someone -- after the student leaves, even if they are unmaintained.

Happy antiquity! (I'm maintaining - well, sometimes at least - an 
internetography on renaissance intellectual history 
[http://www.gwdg.de/~hkuhn1/pagehist.html] and have had to ex-
perience, that Ingo Schuetze's really excellent pages on Giro-
lamo Cardano apparently entered electronic nirwana after he left
his hosting institution, and that other fine sites changed their
URL or even vanished as well.) BTW: I *do* share Karen Schneider's 
views, that it's not only electronic documents that vanish and that 
"information is hard work". 


> I'd be interested in any general conclusions you might find, BTW!

I'll report here about any "hard" findings that might be mailed to
me personally. 

With renewed thanks

Heinrich C. Kuhn
+---------------------------------------------------------
!   Dr. Heinrich C. Kuhn   (coordinator libraries &c.)
!   Max-Planck-Gesellschaft / Generalverwaltung VIIIb3
!   Postfach 10 10 62 /  D-80084 Muenchen
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