WebCite has a different, and very special, mission. It’s for scholarly and professional authors whose articles are themselves persistently linkable by way of Digital Object Identifiers. Increasingly those articles cite more ephemeral things, like blog entries. Using a WebCite bookmarklet, these authors can produce URLs that point to archived copies of web pages. Think Wayback Machine, but you can ask to have an item archived and be sure that it will be.
A laudable effort and one I hope will be supported by all publishers. Perhaps it can be part of a standard for linking publications with web content
Of course, this only adds to the challenge of trying to understand, define, and consolidate online identity.
on a slightly related note, check out this greasemonkey script I've been working on to add citation data to Pubmed searches: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13704
I'm concerned about the way this is being done. For one, using a TinyURL scheme destroys the human readable info in the permalinks we've all worked to create. Second, I doubt that putting everything into one central repository will improve the percent availability of the collection, and if something does happen, there's a central point of failure.
Is the cost of a high-availability web mirror database equal to or below the value of citations that the content owner and citing author don't find important enough to keep updated themselves?
I actually don't mind the human readable issue, since IMO the best use for something like this is for machines. I do agree that putting everything in one repository is not the best idea, but I do like the idea of an aggregation URI, especially one that persists information.
Early days for a lot of such stuff. Things will get better as time goes on.
WebCite – Persistent URLs for publishers
My favorite techie points us to WebCite.
A laudable effort and one I hope will be supported by all publishers. Perhaps it can be part of a standard for linking publications with web content
Of course, this only adds to the challenge of trying to understand, define, and consolidate online identity.
Technorati Tags: WebCite, Publishing, DOI