The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released the results of its third annual analysis of link rot among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the Web and archived though the Chesapeake Project.

The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs....

These findings demonstrate a dramatic increase in link rot among archived Web content over time.

The Chesapeake Project was designed to preserve born-digital legal information published directly to the Web. It was launched in early 2007 by the Georgetown Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia.

The Chesapeake project has expanded by adding a new law library to the project. It has also become the model for The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) which has announced the formation of its Legal Information Archive, a collaborative digital preservation program for the law library community.

See also, an earlier report: Recent report on Link Rot.