But Will We Find it a Year From Now?
Introduction
This paper discusses some of the practical aspects of long term preservation and access to online electronic journals. It is based on experiences in locating and tracking titles selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia. These publications have not all been electronic journals as such - some have been more like single titles (monographs), conference proceedings or general 'homepages' put on the web by individuals or organisations. Nevertheless, the same principles seem to apply.
It looks at some of the ways that publishers of online materials can help their titles to survive, and at some of the ways in which the National Library of Australia is attempting to cooperate with publishers of material selected for national preservation to create an archive of preserved titles.
Terminology
As a point of clarification, 'title' is used in the same way as it is for print media - the name of the electronic object or 'the entity being considered'. 'Homepage' can be used in 2 ways - the first way is to describe a document or set of documents mounted on the web by an individual or organisation such as 'Wendy Smith's Homepage'. It is also used to describe the first entry point to the title online or the title URL, as in 'click here to return to the homepage' It can usually be determined by the context which meaning is appropriate. A single title usually consists of more than one documents - each document has its own unique URL. 'Site' is used to describe the place or domain where the title is hosted. An individual site can host one or more titles.
Electronic Preservation - Some Practical Issues
It is important to realise that electronic materials cannot be treated in the same way as printed materials. The following three differences have considerable influence on procedures for preservation and access:
- the easy accessibility of the electronic publishing medium for just about everyone and everything - for the trivial or the serious; vanity or scholarly publishing
- the relative ease, for the publisher, of changing or editing an electronic publication online
- the almost universal existence of hypertext links in electronic publications
Ease of Accessibility
The relative ease of mounting an electronic publication means that there is an ever escalating amount of material appearing online. There is so much available even now that organisations like the National Library of Australia, which have a role to preserve the printed literary output of Australia, are not able to apply the same collecting procedures to electronic materials as they would to their print equivalents. At present, the costs and staff time involved in acquiring and making available this material are much greater than for its print equivalent, and it is hard to see how this will be reduced, at least in the short term. As a result, there is a need to be much more selective.
Ease of Change
The relative ease of changing material online gives the publisher a flexibility he never had in print. Corrections, updates, reader feedback, reviews can all be included as they come to hand. Unlike printed media, electronic media is not fixed and unchanging. This means that the concept of the integrity of a single print 'edition' can completely disappear in the online version. This can make the decision as to when or which 'copy' to preserve very problematical.
Hypertext Links
Hypertext links are another feature of publishing not found in the print media. Some online titles consist almost entirely of links to other documents, which themselves are not necessarily published by the owner of the original title. Problems of copyright and of identifying ownership can become quite complex very quickly. If all the actual linked documents were included, then the size of one single title could become encyclopedic.
PANDORA Project
The National Library of Australia is implementing a project called Pandora (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources in Australia). Its purpose is to identify online titles selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia and to implement procedures to archive and make accessible this material.
Most online Australian publications have been examined - good, bad, and indifferent. Guidelines have been established for selection for preservation and titles are being selected in accordance with those guidelines. To date, around 120 titles have been selected for preservation and archiving. These titles have survived both the preliminary selection round, and a further in depth analysis against the selection criteria. The in-depth analysis phase has seen attributes like content, reliability, stability, form and format recorded.
Towards the end of 1996, contact was made with a small group of publishers, asking their permission to include their title in the National Library of Australia archive. Of about 25 requests, 20 replies - all acceptances- were received. The non respondents generally represented 'homepages' - of small groups or non profit organizations.
It would appear that many 'serious' non commercial publishers of electronic material are keenly interested in its preservation. Given the magnitude of the issues involved, it is almost a certainty that this can only be with the cooperation of many of the key players in the field.
Survival Rates of Electronic Titles
The survival rates of two different sets of (mostly) Australian titles, each about 12 months old have recently been analysed. The results have been very encouraging, and indicate that there is a reasonable degree of sophistication in the approach to presentation and maintenance of titles online.
1996 Australian Federal Election Internet Resources
Early last year, the National Library of Australia decided to document the existence of the 1996 Australian Federal election materials on the Internet, and listed the sites as hypertext links. Although it was considered desirable to capture and archive the content of those sites, at the time this was not possible. In order to evaluate the success of capturing the content now, the original sites have been examined to see what of relevance still exists. Two main characteristics were examined - whether the site itself could still be located , and whether the election material was still present in any form. Tables 1 and 2 provide a summary of the results.
Table 1 - 1996 Australian elections, sites still locatable:
| Sites still directly accessible | ||
| Sites with live redirect to new URL | ||
| Sites not directly accessible, but locatable | ||
| Sites lost | ||
| TOTAL |
Table 2 - 1996 Australian elections , information still correct
| Information relatively the same | ||
| Information not on site | ||
| Information incorrect | ||
| Sites lost | ||
| TOTAL |
Locatable sites amounted to 84% of the total number of sites originally listed. Some of these needed some detective work such as truncating the listed URL or using a search engine to find them. Correct information, however, was only found in around 60% of sites. This result is probably not too surprising in what is a relatively volatile publishing environment. Interestingly, 4 sites, mostly major players in the information game, have kept their site as an archive.
It is possible to examine in more detail how each site has performed over the one year time period, with respect to the type of site and its 'owner' or publisher. This analysis is given at the Appendix to this paper.
Mini-Database: Australian Online Publishing, 1996
The other set of titles was generated as a mini database by the National Library of Australia in January 1996. Its coverage was broader, representing the types of material that were then candidates for selection by Pandora (although the rules for some categories of information have changed since then.) Once more, the 'locatability' of the site has been analysed. Since it is now not possible to know what was actually on each site in January last year, change has been estimated by looking at the last updated date on the entry page, or the 'last modified date' in the 'view/information' field in Netscape for the entry URL.
Total reliance in the accuracy of these is not guaranteed. In particular, a title might well be altered at a different URL to the entry one, so the likelihood is that the figures quoted below significantly underestimate the rate of change. Conversely, it does not take account of the degree of change, which might have been minimal or cosmetic, with no significant effect on the information contained in the title.
Activity or change of contents has implications were for capture and archiving - how current or representative will an 'archive' be if, say, the site or title is only captured once. For the election material, one would not expect much activity after the election, so if the various sites had been captured just post election, a relatively accurate rendition of the final state of each title would probably have been obtained.
For the mini database, Table 3 gives results for locatability, Table 4 for changeability.:
Table 3 - Mini database, sites still locatable
| Sites still directly accessible | |||
| Sites with live redirect to new URL | |||
| Sites not directly accessible, but locatable | |||
| Sites lost | |||
| TOTAL |
Compared to the 'ephemeral' election results, almost all of these sites are still accessible. Only 2 URL's out of 54 have been lost - one of these is not too surprising as it was owned by the then Prime Minister, and the election of March 1996 changed the government of Australia. This does indicate the complexities of 'position' versus 'person' in allocating URL's and similarly email addresses.
Table 4 - Mini database, most recent activity at title level
| Cumulating % | ||
| Within last 7 days | ||
| Within the last 1 to 4 weeks | ||
| Within the last 1 to 3 months | ||
| Within the last 3 to 9 months | ||
| Over 9 months ago |
Activity is related to the issue of ease of making changes in an online environment. Over 40% of material in the mini database has changed in the past month from mid December 1996 to mid January 1997. Less than 10% has not changed after 9 months.
The implications of this for capture strategies is quite significant. For titles that are selected for preservation it is important to establish good working relationships with the publisher to make certain that information captured is up to date and a correct or complete rendition of the title.
Active Survival or Benign Neglect
One decision which needs to be made is whether the publisher wants his title to survive. Just as some modern artists intend their works to be ephemeral such as sculpture made out of chocolate, so some titles may not be intended for long-term survival. Although the purpose of this paper is to discuss how to help online materials survive, there is however, an interesting point of view put forward by an American based author, William J Mitchell, whose book City of bits was published simultaneously in both hardcopy and electronically. In an article describing the process, Homer to Home-Page: designing Digital Books, he makes many interesting comments about the similarities and more importantly the differences of the two versions. This is his final conclusion.
Hardback and paperback books eventually go out of print. Archival libraries selectively perform the function of preserving books after that point. But what about online books? Since it does take some effort and resources to keep them around, and even more to keep them growing and changing, they are likely to have quite limited lives. How long do they stay available online? What is the electronic equivalent of going out of print? Who is responsible for long-term archiving?
Answers to these questions are likely to vary with the type of book, and may change over time as online publication grows in importance, but I can give a provisional answer for City of Bits online. I regard it as a kind of extended live performance in a vast virtual theater. Eventually, that performance will end. The site that remains will not instantly disappear, but will slowly fade away like an abandoned stage-set-as link-rot sets in and as additions and updates are no longer made. As time goes by, there will be fewer and fewer visitors.
In the end, the City of Bits will be an electronic ruin. Like Troy, it will cease to function and to live becoming, instead, part of the archaeology of cyberspace.
This is probably a minority view, and most librarians at least would want to try and preserve the bookish Troy while it is still a viable and complete entity, preserved at the height of its intellectual powers.
How to Improve Survival Rates
To improve survival rates depends in part on the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest - publishers who most closely adapt to the changing nature of electronic publishing are likely to find that their titles will survive the longest. Just as traditional publishers are not expected to be responsible for the long-term storage and survival of their output, neither is it likely that electronic publishers will be responsible for the long-term survival and storage of their materials. But just as hardcopy publishers can be helped to give their works the best chance of a long life - by using good quality paper, bindings, with universally accepted identifiers (eg ISBN) and national bibliographic databases, so electronic publishers can be given advice that will give their works a fair chance of survival.
Access
Any title intended for preservation has to be visible - it has to be discoverable and then to be easily locatable for as long as possible on the Internet.
Naming
Choosing a simple, memorable and easily spelt title, which is unlike any other will help. Even if readers lose their bookmarks and any other location information, they should still be able to find the title using an online search strategy. If the service provider goes broke and loses all redirect messages, a simple but unique title should still help the document to be found. Ibn Qirtaiba is good, as long as the spelling can be remembered. Although search engines exist to help locate information on the Internet, they are not always particularly useful. The first 30 hits in a search for the title Tropical living gave results ranging from houses for sale, resorts to visit and elephant information. It did not produce the title being looked for.
Title Information, Indexing and 'Metadata'
Metadata is a word which ultimately is of great importance to locating material. While the world's experts continue to try and establish 'metadata' standards, it is still imperative to include some value added descriptive and meaningful entries to your title and document information. This might be as simple as filling in some of the blanks in, say, the 'file/summary info' screen in Word for Windows with well thought out subject and keyword entries. When saved as an HTML file, this will automatically create some meta tags for your online document.
For titles to be accessible, be clear in the data used to describe them. The title which displays at the top of the screen in most browsers is also indexed by software to provide keyword access to the contents of the site. It is important to make the title as representative of the contents and context of the document as possible. As Mitchell says:
(search )engines explore the Web periodically to create large indexes and directories, then, in response to users' queries, employ these indexes and directories to provide very rapid access to the relevant Web sites. They perform their explorations in a variety of ways-by looking for specified keywords in the titles or headers of Web documents, by scanning through the documents themselves, or even by searching other indexes and directories. They are usually pretty dumb, since they just look for keyword matches. So, to make sure that your site is not missed by the search engines which have now become very important tools for finding one's way around the Web you must make sure that the appropriate descriptors are included in titles and headers, and in the text of the opening pages. Incidentally, you can reliably attract a lot of attention by scattering words like "sex" and "nude" through your text but it may not be the sort of attention that you want!
Try looking at the heading on the screen to see what title information is recorded there - sometimes it is no more meaningful than 'Index' 'Report' or 'Table of contents'. For example, the title page entry to Electronic Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is shown as 'Journal Home Page' (Each linked individual issue is more clearly defined - eg EJIST-Vol. 1 No. 4). Ibn Qirtaiba has the very comprehensive heading ' Ibn Qirtaiba SF Magazine'
Changing the title URL
It has been the nature of the Internet, at least up to the present, that URL's change relatively frequently as owners of information change Internet service providers, and as the whole naming structure of the Internet is refined. Michael Lesk, in a lecture Mad Library Disease- Holes in the Stacks in April 1996 stated that 'the average URL for example has a life of 44 days' If the URL of a title is changed, it is important that an onscreen redirect message is present at the old site for as long as possible.
Copyright and Legal Deposit
This is a very large issue, which is subject to considerable discussion both in Australia and overseas. At present, electronic materials are not generally subject to legal deposit, so any online information copied for preservation has to be with the permission of its owner. If permission is not granted, then obviously long term archiving through something like the Pandora project is not possible.
Organisation
One of the interesting things about online information is the variety of ways that publishers have decided to organise their information.
Logical Structure
Either a simple hierarchical or a flat structure, with a good table of contents or index is a big help. This not only helps the reader to navigate around the title, but also makes it much easier for its assessment, analysis and subsequent capture if it is chosen for preservation. A logical structure is also a help if a reader accidentally jumps in to the title at a URL below the title entry level.
Construction
This varies from the simple traditional published style like 'I'll put it up once, and it will always stay the same' (most likely a simple report, novel etc), to the slightly more complex 'I'll mount each issue of my serial publication as a single, maybe dated issue' (scholarly journals, newspapers).
Online publishing doesn't stop there, however. There is the 'I'll put it up, but then I'll add in readers feedback', or the 'Oops, I made a mistake so I'd better correct it' styles. Some sites seem like large brown paperbags - 'I'll keep stuffing things in to it until a) it bursts and everything is scattered; b) it overflows and I start up another bag, c) it gets a hole and bits leak out'
Some examples include:
Australian Humanities Review - which is basically individual issues, with each issue including feedback for a given period of time. Its capture for preservation would ideally be at the end of each cycle of additions.
Yoni - is probably a big brown paper bag, maybe with a small hole in the bottom. Capture for archiving is more tricky here, because at present it has not been determined whether bits are leaking out the hole and being lost forever, or whether the bag is being repacked and the overflow stored in another bag.
AMO's Music Magazine has burst - its contents have gradually been scattered, some documents being picked up by other sites, but some lost forever.
None of these construction styles should give any great concern for their archiving and preservation, as long as the following details are known about the title:
- its method of construction
- how it changes with time
- how the publisher determines that it should be preserved
Updated Information
There can be problems if retrospective corrections/changes are made to previously 'published' online issues. For example, the Internet Journal of Health Promotion basically consists of individual articles, each of which was originally given a volume and issue number. Volume 1 No.1 was dated 18/10/95, but when called up in July 96 it was 'last updated December 1995'. By January 1997, the whole site has been reworked and updated, the volume and issue number system has disappeared, and the appearance of the journal has changed somewhat. Which is the 'correct' edition?
It is almost impossible to keep track of all changes like this. The best that can be done is to record the date of capture of the archived version, and refer users to the current online version for the most recent changes. Readers will need to be educated to check the 'last corrected' date to find just what version is being read, just as in the past they needed to look at the edition number of a printed work.
Mega Sites
Size of the 'title' can also be an issue. In electronic publishing there are the corporate mega-sites - eg the ANU Coombs Computing Unit, the Australian National Botanic Gardens, or National Library of Australia sites. These sites are a mixture of many individual titles, reports and general corporate information held on a common domain. Parts of the domain may have individually been selected for preservation - eg In flower this week , parts may be available in hardcopy; parts are basically 'internal' information eg computing services at the Botanic Gardens; and parts are discussion lists - eg on the Coombs and NLA sites. Do we want to preserve all of this, and if so, how?
Hypertext Links
Hypertext links are one of the joys of electronic publishing - the thing that really takes an electronic publication beyond its print equivalent. Hypertext links can be either 'on site', where they are located on the same domain that the title itself is hosted, or they can be 'off site' where they are hosted on a totally different, often unrelated domain. If an online title is to be preserved, it is important that consideration be given to the existence of these links, whether or not they can or should be preserved. Offsite links in particular are a major issue - for at least two reasons. Firstly, the automated software now in use to gather up a site for archiving generally is programmed only to collect 'on-site' links. Secondly, issues of copyright and permission to copy become horrendous if every off site link is collected.
Onsite Links
Even just collecting onsite links can be a problem, because sometimes different titles on the same site may have different 'owners'. Links can be to files in the same directory, to a lower subdirectory, to an upwards parent directory or domain, or to a separate site or server. There is no consistency across titles as to how links are assigned. There is no guaranteeing that material accessed by links in the same 'domain' will all be owned by the same publisher.
Links in the same title domain will normally be kept. However, as discussed later, some titles have other titles embedded in them, with different 'owners', for which separate copyright permissions need to be sought, and maybe separate catalogue records created. This will be very time-consuming to monitor. This issue becomes almost impossible when the megasites (see below) are considered.
Offsite Links
For practical purposes, the Pandora project will generally not be collecting off-site links. This is usually justified intellectually by drawing comparisons with bibliographies or references in print media - the full text is not included with any references, the reader is expected to find it himself.
There are some cases, however, where a linked offsite document might be usefully captured. Occasionally, the linked offsite document would normally be included as part of the main text or as an appendix. The Australian World Heritage Areas site, includes links to the UNESCO documents describing the selection criteria. In the first two sentences of the title:
'World Heritage properties are sites with exceptional natural and/or cultural values. All of the properties on the World Heritage List must meet specific World Heritage Criteria. The following document provides information on these sites, including site information, maps, pictures and legislation details, as well as answering questions such as:
What is World Heritage?
How is Property Listed?
What are the implications of World Heritage Listing?
What Countries and States are Parties to the World Heritage Convention?
two out of the 6 quoted links are external, although it seems obvious that the main document considers all of them to be integral to the title.
Another similar example is the Lampeter 1996 Symposium. This is a site in Wales, but has a direct link to an ANU site where an online exhibition is mounted.
Another case for considering capture of off site links is where the linked document might really 'belong' on the site, but for various reasons - prior publication etc, might already exist at another location. An example of this is Tropical Living, which consists in a large part of articles written by the one author. However, one of his articles exists on another server. Does the title lose its completeness if that article isn't captured?
Flight of Ducks also presents a problem. Its entry point URL is at a different site to the rest, and by far the largest majority, of the title.
It appears that there will be some external links on a totally different site that may need to be kept but these will need to be decided on a case by case basis.
Ownership of Linked Documents
As an example of how complicated the preservation of links is and the integrity of the single title, consider the case of Australian Music Online (AMO)'s Australian Music Magazine. This title has announced it is to disappear, and so it has been saved to a temporary archive. Its title URL is http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/mag.html, but the homepage of the site, is http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/welcome.html. From the title URL, there are other still active links to:
The big backyard (http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/bby.html),
UnderWorld wide web (http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/underworld/),
High in the Internet (http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/counnews.html)
There are inactive links to Australian music report, Lovegroves ear on London, Whats rocking Christie . These titles have all been shifted to another title In music and media, itself also selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia .
When the title URL was swept by Webwhacker , the latter 3 titles were not picked up. However, the former 3 titles were, as well as a selection of other titles including White man can't reggae home page (http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/whiteman/index.html), and Rhythms on the ether (http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/rhythms/), none of which were found linked from the main title URL. (They were in fact accessible from the homepage of the site.)
Links-Only Sites
The National Library of Australia has decided that it will not collect sites that comprise largely of links - basically bibliographies which organise information on a common theme - no matter how good they are. So neither Telstra's site This is Australia nor the Australasian Legal Information site has been selected for preservation because their real meaning and information content resides in the linked titles. These titles themselves, could of course be selected individually for preservation.
Maintenance of Links and 'Link-Rot'
Just as it may become difficult to access a title if its URL changes, so hypertext links included in a title are subject to a similar problem - sometimes called 'link rot'. For links internal to a title on the same site, it is important to use relative addressing when first establishing the links - then if the main URL changes, all others will still be logically accessible. For offsite links, however, the process is more complicated. As William Mitchell says, one needs to:
combat link-rot by identifying and removing hot-links to sites that have died, shifted to new locations, or become irrelevant. (If this is not done, a site quickly loses its charm like an untended garden.)
While this is possible if the publisher still wants to maintain the title, it is unlikely to be followed through in an archive, due to the volume of material stored in it.
Implications for the PANDORA Project
Develop a Relationship with Individual Publishers
The project can only work with cooperation of individual publishers or owners of titles. All publishers of titles proposed for inclusion in the archive will be individually contacted.
Establish Frequency of Capture for Archiving
Decisions on frequency of capture will need to be made almost on a title by title basis.
There are several alternatives, and it may be necessary to use them all in the project:
- publishers to notify the Library of all updates or new issues
- software used to monitor changes
- periodic sampling by Library staff.
Make Clear the Date of Capture and Authentication of Data
Date of capture for all archived material needs to be recorded, or some other form of datestamping to ensure integrity of information.
Establish Capture Strategies Based on the Organisation on Information in the Title
Some strategies are likely to be:
- Individual issue serial (usually numbered or dated; regular or irregular publication) - each new issue will be captured - individually or in batches, and added directly to the National Library of Australia archive
- 'True' monographs and conference proceedings will mostly be 'fixed' or have a final 'completion' date - make a single capture into the archive, with the publisher to nominate the time. Generally one capture of the main text will be sufficient. Any significant change, say 25% of total contents might be equivalent to a new 'edition'. This can then be captured and archived together with the existing copy.
- The ever growing or ever changing - there are 2 alternative scenarios: the title truly grows and nothing is dropped off , with each issue it just gets bigger, or else there may be both additions and/or deletions from one issue to the next. The type of change will need clarifying with the publisher and a range of capture strategies will need to be used.
Appendix
Analysis of viability of Election 96 site - status at January 1997
NB Shaded sites have disappeared or have no election information available
General Sites
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| Medianet - Media on the Web - Election 96 | truncate to Medianet | Site not at same URL, but findable - no election 96 information |
| L O'Keefe's election site | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site | |
| ABC Online Election 96 | post election updates, videos etc last modified 10/12/96 | Still at same URL, election 96 information archived |
| M Farnsworth - Aust's Federal Elect 96 | last modified 24/2, resource for secondary schools | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Weblink Village Election News | last modified 14/2 , | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
Parties
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| ALP Campaign Notebook | truncate to general ALP site, archives 'under construction' has i'view of Nicole Kidman with Ray Martin on '96 electn | Site not at same URL, but findable - no election 96 information |
| Shooters Party | found via Aussie Web Wombat, only recent info | Site not at same URL, but findable - no election 96 information |
| Australian Democrats HP | direct link to new site, internal links to platform papers and Elect 96 statements | Site not at same URL, but findable - some election 96 information still locatable |
| Liberal Party | major organisation, internal link to coalition policies, 'a complete resource for the '96 Fed Elect | Site not at same URL, but findable - some election 96 information still locatable |
| B Starkies HP | Aust Dem candidate | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site |
| Prime Ministers (PKeating's) HP | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site | |
| Q'land Greens | several urls found - none work | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site |
| SA Democrats | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site | |
| Tas Greens | last modified 15/12, state issues only | Still at same URL, but no election 96 information |
| WA Greens | last modified 2/12, state issues only | Still at same URL, but no election 96 information |
| Leader of Opposition (JHoward) | last modified ? Kim Beazely info | Still at same URL, but wrong information |
| Aust Womens Party | last modified 2/1 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Dem Socialist Party | last modified 19/2 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| M McGrath's HP | last modified 9/2, ALP candidate | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| No Aircraft Noise Party | last modified 19/3 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Science,Tech'y & Research Party | last modified 23/5 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Aust Greens | last modified 2/4, onsite link to archive of election articles, policies | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
| National Party | last modified 26/11 - onsite links to Fed NP policies | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
| Natural Law Party | last modified ?, onsite link to press releases for Fed Elect 96 | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
Independents
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| A Galletly | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site | |
| M Jones | last modified 7/3, Indep. Senate candidate. | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
Newspapers
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| (The) Age - Election 96 | truncate to Age site | Site not at same URL, but findable - no election 96 information |
| Sydney Morning Herald - Election 96 | info archived on 5/3 | Still at same URL, election 96 information archived |
| Aust Financial Review - Elect 96 | Post election info | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
Internet Polls
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| A Bevis Electronic feedback/query | ALP candidate | Site not at same URL, no sign of new site |
| Medianet Cyberpoll | last modified 13/6, inactive internal link to Election 96 | Still at same URL, but no election 96 information |
| Netcetera Multimedia: Aust Federal Elect 96. | originally listed as an Internet poll, now has an archive on the election hidden in its structure | Still at same URL, election 96 information archived |
| 1996 Aust Election Survey | last modified 5/2 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
Other sites
| Title or site | Currency/locatability | Current status |
| Voting, Democracy and Alternatives | truncation, url changed slightly | Site not at same URL, but findable - some election 96 information still locatable |
| Aust Republican M'ment | last modified 30/12, current info only | Still at same URL, but no election 96 information |
| Parliamentary Library - Election Info | last modified 16/12, current info only | Still at same URL, but no election 96 information |
| A Langer | last modified 1/2 how to vote informal | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Aust Electoral Commission | last modified 15/8, summary of election results | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| National Clearinghouse for Youth studies - Fed Elect 96 | last modified 4/3 | Still at same URL, election 96 information relatively unchanged (either pre or just post election) |
| Community Aid Abroad - Election Issues | last modified 15/10, onsite links to election issues | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
| D Walsh's Arts Policy Pages | last modifed 26/9, onsite links to some pre election policies | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
| Womens Electoral Lobby - Fed Elect 96 | last modified 10/12, onsite links to election issues | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
| Youth Monitor, No. 2 Election Issues | last modified 1/9, onsite links to election materials | Still at same URL, some election 96 information findable on general site (either pre or just post election) |
References
The following titles and sites have been referenced in this paper. They were current and accessible at 15 January 1997 (except AMO's Music magazine).
| Title or site | Entry URL |
| Selection Committee on Online Australian Publications (SCOAP), Guidelines for the Selection of Online Australian Publications Intended for Preservation by the National Library | http://www.nla.gov.au/1/scoap/scoapgui.html |
| 1996 Australian Federal Election - Internet Resources | http://www.nla.gov.au/collect/election.html |
| City of bits | http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/City_of_Bits/ |
| Homer to Home-Page: designing Digital Books by William J Mitchell | http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/City_of_Bits/Text_Unbound/text_unbound.html |
| Ibn Qirtaiba - magazine of the SF SIG of Australian Mensa | http://sf.sig.au.mensa.org/ |
| Tropical living | http://www.goldendolphin.com/tlzine/tlopen.htm |
| Journal of Instructional Science and Technology - an electronic journal | http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/homepage.htm |
| Mad Library Disease: Holes in the Stacks by Michael Lesk | http://community.bellcore.com/lesk/ucla/ucla.html |
| Australian Humanities Review | http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/ |
| yOni | http://www.yoni.com/ until recently at http://www.ion.com.au/yoni/ |
| AMO's Music Magazine | http://www.aussiemusic.com.au/mag.html |
| Internet Journal of Health Promotion | http://www.monash.edu.au/health/IJHP/ |
| Lampeter Symposium, 1996
Online exhibit for symposium |
http://www.lamp.ac.uk/oz/symp96.html
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~andrea/welshoz/welshoz.html |
| Australian World Heritage Areas
UNESCO |
http://kaos.erin.gov.au/net/auswha.html
http://www.unesco.org/ |
| Flight of ducks | http://www.cinemedia.net/SFCV-RMIT-Annex/spockley/spockley1.html
http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~pockley/spockley4.html |
| Telstra's This is Australia | http://springboard.telstra.com.au/australia/index.htm |
| Australasian Legal Information Institute | http://www.austlii.edu.au/ |
| Australian National Botanic Gardens | http://osprey.erin.gov.au/anbg/anbg.html |
| In Flower this Week | http://osprey.erin.gov.au/anbg/iftw.html |
| Coombs Computing Unit - ANU | http://coombs.anu.edu.au/ |
| National Library of Australia | http://nla.gov.au/ |