404/File Not Found – Washington D.C.

Georgetown Law

On October 24, 2014, Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C. will host a symposium that explores the problem of link and reference rot. The symposium is titled 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent. 

The Web is fluid and mutable, and this is a “feature” rather than a “bug”. But it also creates challenges in the legal environment (and elsewhere) when fixed content is necessary for legal writers to support their conclusions. Judges, attorneys, academics, and others using citations need systems and practices to preserve web content as it exists in a particular moment in time, and make it reliably available.

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