Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Rise of the news DJs
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Jan. 28, 2016, 10:43 a.m.
Aggregation & Discovery
LINK: amberlink.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen   |   January 28, 2016

It’s been about a year since the Berkman Center at Harvard launched, in beta, a tool called Amber that helps preserve copies of every page linked to on a website. It’s an important project because, as we wrote at the time:

[Broken links are] a problem for anyone who publishes on the web, but particularly for news organizations — both because that network of links is an important part of the historical record and because so many news site redesigns and CMS changes have killed a disproportionate share of the web’s URLs.

A 2013 study found that 49 percent of links in Supreme Court decisions were dead, for instance (and the percentage is no doubt higher now), while more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles contain dead external links.

On Thursday, Berkman made Amber available to everyone as a plugin for WordPress and a module for Drupal.

Once the plugin is installed, copies of each linked page are stored on the host website’s server. But users can also choose to store them instead through donated space on Wayback Machine, Perma.cc, and Amazon Web Services.

Download it (or get more information) here.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Rise of the news DJs
“For an increasing subset of readers, ‘articles’ will be as invisible as CSS code.”
The future-of-journalism crowd stops ignoring local TV news
“The reality is that people of color in the U.S. are more likely to turn to TV news for local information than they are newspapers or digital-first local news.”
Journalism prepares for a post-search, post-social future
“The loss of reach for news publishers comes with a loss of visibility, which is likely to hit new, digital-born journalism organizations the hardest.”