WebCite

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WebCite is a free tool for scholarly authors to cite webpages which have previously been archived to prevent linkrot. The purpose of the tool is to allow future readers to retrieve what had been cited by the author in the past.

Rather than relying on a crawler which archives pages in a "random" fashion, authors who want to cite webpages in a scholarly article can initiate the archiving process. They then cite - instead of or in addition to the original URL - a WebCite address, with a specific identifier which identifies the snapshot of the page they meant to cite.

Web archivists generally archive all types of web content including HTML web pages, style sheets, JavaScript, images, and video. They also archive metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length. This metadata is useful in establishing authenticity and provenance of the archived collection.

[edit] References

• Gunther Eysenbach and Mathieu Trudel (2005). "Going, going, still there: using the WebCite service to permanently archive cited web pages". Journal of Medical Internet Research 7 (5).

[edit] See also

• Digital preservation
• Uniform Resource Locator
• Web archiving

[edit] External links

• http://www.webcitation.org/