18.327 references and URLs

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 327.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: robert delius royar <r.royar_at_morehead-st.edu> (23)
         Subject: Re: references and URLs

   [2] From: Michael Fraser <mike.fraser_at_COMPUTING- (13)
                 SERVICES.OXFORD.AC.UK>
         Subject: Re: 18.322 references and URLs

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 07:18:03 +0000
         From: robert delius royar <r.royar_at_morehead-st.edu>
         Subject: Re: references and URLs

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 (09:49 +0100 UTC) Humanist Discussion Group (by way of...:

>From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
>[...]
>The Wayback Machine works by URL and date, and so by itself strongly
>supports the recommended practice. I've used it, crucially to be able to
>cite the entire run of the Recent Science Newsletter, which was deleted
>without notice by George Washington University after the Center for the
>History of Recent Science folded. Other universities may have more
>enlightened policies and actually follow them, but this one incident
>certainly made the point for me. But still the question remains.

Wayback relies on the Alexa crawler, and on my site I have had problems
with a crawler listed in Alexa's IP range snooping in areas that are
dissallowed by the rules Alexa says it follows. I have also noticed that
updates for this year do not seem as plentiful as for years past and that
more of them are turning up "The owner of this site has disallowed search..."

So, it may be that the Wayback machine is not so complete as one might
expect. A crawler is just a worm that aerates more than it contaminates.
They both can eat up bandwidth and slow the crawled server's responses. I
believe the MLA also now blocks spiders and other crawlers.

--
Dr. Robert Delius Royar <r.royar_at_morehead-st.edu>
Associate Professor of English, Morehead State University
                      Making meaning one message at a time.
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 07:23:40 +0000
         From: Michael Fraser <mike.fraser_at_COMPUTING-SERVICES.OXFORD.AC.UK>
         Subject: Re: 18.322 references and URLs
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard
McCarty              <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
  >          Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 09:43:45 +0100
  >          From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
  >           >
  > I asked my question about URLs in a deliberately provocative way to get
  > some help thinking about the nitty-gritty practicalities of writing for a
  > medium in which space is often very limited.
[material deleted]
  > Comments?
Only a wee bit of suprise that you made no reference to any of the
previous postings written in response to your initial question ;-)
Mike