Missing and Recovery of URLs Using Internet Archive: A Case Study on African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science (AJLAIS)

Abstract

In recent times, authors of academic publications have depended on web resources. However, there have been some concerns raised on the permanency of e-resources on the web. In this context, this article investigated the availability, missing and recovery of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) citations cited in articles in the African Journal of Library, Archive and Information Science (AJLAIS) published between 2008 and 2017 using Internet Archive. A total of 986 URL citations in 129 research articles published in LIS journals were extracted. The finding showed that URL citations of the journal grew during the years 2008-2017 Finding further revealed that 986 represented 28.88% of the total 3414 references that appeared in the journal in the period under review. Of the total cited web citations 986 web citations 310(31.4%) were not accessible and 676 (68.6%) were accessible. This article adopted a W3C link checker to detect HTTP errors linked with missing URLs. HTTP 500 error messages (‘page not found’) were majorly the irresistible messages that denoted 20 per cent of all HTTP error messages. The highest percentage of missing URLs were associated with commercial domains. The attempt to recover 310 missing URL citations through Internet Archive increased the active web citations from 676 to 918 which accounted for 93.1% of active URL citations. This study further showed a negative correlation between path depth and missing URL citations. The statistical analysis of this research indicated that the number of citations and URL citations are positively correlated.

Keywords

• web citations
• missing url citations
• recovery of url citations
• internet archive
• african journal of library
• archives and information science
• ajlais