Friday, June 27, 2008

Citing blogs, preserving cited webpages etc with WebCite

Today I presented at the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Toronto our work on WebCite, an archiving system for cited web-accessible objects (e.g. webpages, blogs, wikis, online datasets, PDF reports, preprints, any non-journal/non-book webmaterial which cannot be assumed to be present or archived in libraries.
WebCite makes Internet material CITABLE and PERMANENT (ARCHIVED).
WebCite solves a number of problems for various stakeholders.
For citing authors, it removes the problem that cited material may go 404 or change (I am giving a dramatic example in the slideshow - do not look at it if you are offended by sexually explicit material!).
Another angle is that of the (potentially or actually) cited author (e.g. a blogger), who may want to use WebCite to give information to people on how e.g. the blog should be cited (as I do in this blog - see "WebCite this!" link, enabling on-demand archiving of dynamic content) or who may self-archive static content. WebCite is also working on impact metrics for cited authors.
For publishers/editors it solves the problem of links going dead, reviewers not being able to see what the author saw when he cited a dynamic webpage, and it also solves the question of permanently archiving datasets or other additional material cited by the author.

The ELPUB abstract is here (rate the paper here as well!), the full paper is here.
And it is gratifying to see that it inspired at least one person in the audience...

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