Addressing Link Rot in Canadian Jurisprudence

Reading the latest edition of MIRLN, I was reminded again of the Perma.cc service for addressing link rot in journal articles and judicial decisions. I know the issue has been discussed a couple of times on Slaw. I was wondering what Canadian courts are doing to address the problem of link rot. Is there a Canadian equivalent to Perma.cc? Are any Canadian courts using or considering using Perma.cc? Is this a service that could one day be provided by CanLII, or are individual courts’ websites being used for this purpose already?

Comments

  1. Perma.cc is certainly a useful resource, thanks to Melanie for pointing to it. If I understand well their site, Perma.cc seems to be a sort of archives, they store the documents on their servers and keept them accessible. That way, Perma.cc addresses the preservation of electronic documents.

    PURL (https://purl.oclc.org/docs/help.html) could be another approach (also coming out of librarian circles) more narrowly focused on the rotten links problem. PURL does not require from a court to upload all its decisions on a server abroad, PURL may keep a stable URL on a moving address (a changed URL).

    CanLII’s URLs, decision addresses, have been keep valid from inception, August 2000. When CanLII URL schema evolves, old URLs are maintained and linked to the new ones, so they continue to work. That solution however is internal to CanLII, it is not a service offered to other websites.