Hey, it's Adam, just a reminder that we're on a break for the next couple of weeks,

and Rico daily will be back with new episodes in the new year.

In the meantime, here's one of our favorites from this year.

Thanks.

How many times have you gone to click on a link, only to find out that the page, or even

the entire website, no longer exists?

Maybe you're applying to a job, or trying to show a friend a tweet or looking for a delicious

recipe, and the page is just dead, gone, never to be found again.

Experts describe this process as link rod, and they say it can be a serious problem when it comes

to preserving historical records, especially since so much of what we do now is online.

One of these experts is Claire Stanton.

Claire is the member of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School.

And earlier this year, she worked on a study for the Columbia Journalism Review that examined

the problem of link rod. She joins us now to tell us more. Hey, Claire, thanks for being here.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

So tell us what exactly is link rod?

So link rod is an umbrella term for what happens when you're surfing the web, and you click on a link,

and the content that opens up on the other end either is completely gone, or it has changed in a

way that you weren't expecting. A lot of users of the web are familiar with that dreaded 404

page not found error, and that's the prime example of link rod.

In a lot of ways, it's part of the design of the internet.

One of the most powerful things about the web is that it's a place where the most up-to-date

...