Marieke Guy does an impressive job pulling together several estimates and the underlying papers where they come from. It’s one challenging question and getting even more so each day in this time of Twitter and similar services.

Here are some of those numbers:

+ 44 days (the average length of a URL) from Brewster Kahle’s 1997, “Preserving the Internet.”

+ 75 days from Michael Day’s Report: Collecting and preserving the world wide web

+ 100 days from a November, 2003 Washington Post article: On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral.

The Internet Archive now gives 44 -75 days as its ball park figure.

Access the full post and underlying documents.

Source: JISC-PoWR

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 and is filed under Digital Preservation, Info Management and Retrieval. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.