This time I am going to talk about an embarrassing problem that may affect your site; yet no one is going to mention, least of all your customers. It's called link rot. You spend much time and money on designing and writing your website, with graphics and lots of links to other pages, internal and external. Then what happens? You forget about it, other things occupy your time. Meanwhile all those nice links you have put in have changed. You move your pages around; add in new pages and graphics. What's worse those external URLs have moved or disappeared. Before you know it you have a serious case of link rot. Users find more and more dead links to their frustration.
The very least you can do is put up a nice ~404 not found page. See for example http://www.archaeologists.net/notfound.html . The nice picture of Stonehenge on the page is to force Internet Explorer to show this page instead of its default page.
The better solution to link rot is called, Xenu's Link Sleuth. This can check your pages and find broken internal and external links. Best of all it is free. It is for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP platforms. It can be found at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.
Directories
This not coincidently brings me to the subject of directory resources for archaeology. There seems to be a gap in the market at the moment for a good list of British archaeological resources, especially the commercial units. The CBA's listing pages have not been updated for a while and are showing plenty of dead links.
ARGE (Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe) at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~arge/ is also having problems. Searching by country constantly throws up errors. Martijn van Leusen emails that they are having problems with the software and with the lack of system maintenance. Even worse the European section of ArchNet (http://archnet.asu.edu/) has not been updated since January 2002 and still contains an advertisement for the EAA in Esslingen. Also they do not automatically include commercial sites in their listing. Weirdly it has a section for United Kingdom & Scotland (UK) (sic) and a separate section for Wales.
Online Publishing
On a more optimistic note online publishing seems to be a growth area. There is a new Scottish publication initiative called Scottish Internet Archaeology Reports (SAIR) at http://www.sair.org.uk/. SAIR is a joint project by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, with the CBA and Historic Scotland. SAIR is only a pilot at the moment and has published six reports so far in Adobe Acrobat format. A decision will be taken this year whether to continue with the pilot. One comment from their press release "Access to SAIR will, initially at least, be free". Does this mean there will be a future charging policy?
By the time you have read this, the CBA will have held a conference on electronic publication of journals, on October 20th at the Society of Antiquaries. I hope to report on this next time.
© Mark Bell 2003