title: Persistent Web References
creators: Eld Zierau Thomas Hvid Kromann Caroline Nyvang
abstract: In this paper, we suggest adjustments to best practices for persistent web referencing; adjustments that aim at preservation and long time accessibility of web referenced resources in general, but with focus on web references in web archives. Web referencing is highly relevant and crucial for various research fields, since an increasing number of references point to resources that only exist on the web. However, present practices using URL and date reference cannot be regarded as persistent due to the volatile nature of the Internet, - and present practices for references to web archives only refer to archive URLs which depends on the web archives access implementations. A major part of the suggested adjustments is a new web reference standard for archived web references (called wPID), which is a supplement to the current practices. The purpose of the standard is to support general, global, sustainable, humanly readable and technology agnostic persistent web references that are not sufficiently covered by existing practices. Furthermore, it can support better practices for precise references in spite of the temporality issues for web material as well as issues related to closed web archives. In order to explain needed change of practices based on the wPID, the paper includes a thorough description of the challenges in web references. This description is based on the perspectives from computer science, web collection and Digital Humanities.