Harvard University (Harvard Law School, Library Innovation Lab)

The Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and over 130 partner libraries will sustainably scale a tool - Perma.cc - to combat link rot in all scholarly fields. Link rot happens when a hyperlink on a webpage points to a website or online resource that is no longer available. It is a serious problem affecting as much as 70 percent of all scholarly articles in law, medicine, science, and technology, causing irreversible harm to the digital scholarly record. Building on solutions and approaches developed in the field of legal scholarship, this project will grow the Perma library coalition and tackle link rot in other fields. Through this project, the team will scale a proven technology and approach sustainably by designing, testing and launching a service that can subsidize the services offered to those supported by academic library partners.