Legal Research

The Badlink Bounce

By Simon Fodden

Thinking that the resource might be of some interest to our readers, I followed a link from an email list that promised the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Women’s Studies Section–Women’s History Sites [http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/WomensStudies/history.html], with a section on Canada.

• That actually leads to an error message on MIT’s website, one annoying feature of which is that it wipes out the erring URL and replaces it with the totally unhelpful 404 URL. This means that as you attempt to reform the original URL, moving higher up the nested directories looking for a substantive hit, you have to paste the wrong URL in each time. Eventually, I managed to strike substance with http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/.
• From the MIT Humanities page I chose to follow the link to About Women’s Studies Research Room [http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/aboutWSRR.html], which promoted WSSLINKS: Women & Gender Studies Web Sites.
• Following that gave me a “This page has moved” message, but in a while I was transported to the Women’s Studies Section Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association [http://libr.org/wss/wsslinks/index.html]. Bingo! There was a link to resources on History [http://libr.org/wss/wsslinks/history.html], which I followed without incident to a page sporting a link to Canadian History [http://www.library.arizona.edu/users/dickstei/acrlwsshistory#can].
• That led to a “This page has moved” message on a University of Arizona site [http://www.library.arizona.edu/users/dickstei/acrlwsshistory#can]. And, as these referer pages will, it whisked me off to another Arizona U page [http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/dickstei/acrlwsshistory] — a second “This page has moved” 404 message.
• This one whisked me nowhere, but pointed instead to this URL: http://libr.org/wss/WSSLinks/history.html, which the careful reader might recognize as a link we’d already been to some clicks back.

Rinse, repeat.

One could be forgiven for losing interest at this point. You and me both.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).