Over at Technology and Culture, the journal of SHOT, they raise an interesting issue - the reliability and stability of internet links. Edmund Russell and Jennifer Kane examine whether issues raised within the sciences are pertinent to hsitorians and their conclusion is that they are. To quote their conclusion:

The World Wide Web has offered an increasingly common though ephemeral source of information. In research articles in two of the most highly respected history journals, 18 percent of web citations decayed within seven years of publication; 10 percent were inactive shortly after publication. Our findings are roughly consistent with those for science journals; we suspect that this problem extends to other humanities and social science publications. A means created to preserve Internet sites—the Wayback Machine—made 57 percent of the missing articles in our sample available to scholars who knew about the archive. The other 43 percent of the missing links remained beyond the reach even of those searching the archive. Reliance on unarchived ephemera is distressing given our commitment to a documented past. We urge professional societies, journals, and presses to create and adopt professional standards for the use of Internet documents, including means for preserving materials in a way that ensures their accessibility into the indefinite future. Doing so would be a boon to current and future historians.

But how to solve these issues? Do we, as historians, take a page out of early writers’ notebook and keep our own archives of every webpage that we visit? In today’s world, would that be possible, with all of the copyright concerns that writers have?

As a historian who uses a decent number of internet sources, the answer has to be a resounding ‘yes’ because of the need for information to be accessible for future historians. My personal mode of working is for two archiving methods:
~ Paper copies, filed in notebooks, and used during the writing process.
~ Electronic copies (either copy/paste into Endnote or print as PDF) saved for future reference.

Why two archives? It fits my writing style and habits. In addition, it has saved my bacon! Losing a page of notes is not the end of the world and having a file ‘disappear’ (aka being misplaced) is easily remedied.

But on a completely different note, I think that there is a larger question that needs to be answered. What sources are historians using that disappear? Are historians using personal webpages, corporate webpages, or something else? In my historical research, most of my electronic references are for high-quality sources (such as the OED, the DNB, or Governmental Agencies like the Science Museum). In examining these resources, the only one that I am worried about undergoing significant changes would be the Governmental Agencies, who regularly refresh their website. In some ways, this is unavoidable and they should be treated much like oral histories, in such that two researchers can go to the same source and get different stories. To solve that, it may be necessary for historians to publish the sources that they are using (whether that means as an appendix, in the case of much oral history, or seperately, such as on a website that they maintain).