Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
The present study is conducted to analyze the accessibility, deterioration and half-life of URLs of web documents cited in Current Science Journal published during 2015 -2016. A total of 1724 URLs cited in the 1564 articles were examined. It was found that 56.67 percent of URLs were accessible at the time of testing and the remaining 43.33 per-cent of URLs were not accessible. Out of all HTTP error messages, HTTP 404 – ‘file not found’ was the irresistible error message encountered and represented 59.03 percent of all HTTP error messages. Average half-life of URLs of missing URLs was estimated to be 1.76 years. Even though there are various retrieval tools being used to recover vanished URLs, still there is a need to improve such tools.