“It’s a huge problem,” said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian at the Internet Archive in San Francisco in a Washington Post article on the ephemeral nature of the net (link via jordoncooper.com). “The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.”
Yikes. Think that’s frightening for scientists, how about a web-addicted writer like me? I probably do 90 percent of my research online. If the web is going to work longterm, it needs to be a little more reliable.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you care about a page, make a local copy.
I think the problem isn’t necessarily that the page disappears, but rather that the page becomes out of date when not kept up. If you are researching something, you need up-to-date and recent information, especially if checking on something in a consistently changing field.
If you’re researching anything beyond general information, libraries have been and probably will always be the best way to access it. With a lot of them, you can access their resources via the net.
And I’m not sure this stat is all that realistic. There are tons of webpage creation classes, etc. In other words, there’s a lot of webpages created for only temporary reasons, or by people who aren’t going to be able to do the legwork and keep them up.
The one’s that are going to be around for awhile are pretty darn obvious, so I wouldn’t worry about this overly much.