Grading Degradation in an Institutionally Managed Repository

Imagine a library filled with books that have missing pages. It might seem as overly exaggerated, but that metaphor can be used to depict the state of the digital repositories that have been affected by unexpected change. Many research groups (including ours) have examined the implications of the Web’s decentralized administration on the stability of materials. [1-4]. We have found that electronic resources can change, both intentionally and unintentionally, because of different factors and circumstances. Change can occur because of deliberate actions on part of the collector, unexpected events or may be due to other uncontrollable factors. A natural assumption we make is that some sources are highly curated – hence accurate – and others are less institutional and hence more likely to exhibit symptoms of change. However, this is not often the case. For example, we observed that the ACM Digital Library had 15 unique links referencing the different sites in the JCDL conference series and 8 of them report errors or point to the wrong content. Therefore, we have been examining a case study that shows that this assumption does not always hold and also helps illustrate some of the complexities on change in the current Web environment. The corpus for our case study is the Association for Computing Machinery list of conference proceeding