Often times news stories display at one url on a webpage, then after a few months go into an archive. This changes the url of the news story, and sometimes puts it behind a login or pay wall. This is problematic for a website like Crocodyl, because we routinely use online news stories as sources. If the link is broken then the source is no longer useful in verifying our factual assumption.
One technical fix to this problem is using a Mozilla Firefox extension called, Zotero, which was created by a great media democratization organization called The Center for History and New Media.
Zotero allows users to create a "Snapshot" of a web page, that is more robust than a simple screen capture. The snapshot maintains the linking structure, original files and HTML of the page, along with a time stamp of the when the page was accessed. All of this information is saved in a folder on your hard drive. By clicking "view snapshot" on the saved news story, you can later see the web page exactly as it was at the moment you read the story originally. Alternatively, you can click "Show file" and the location of the folder on your hard drive will be displayed. This is especially useful for web pages that might change as a result of a controversy. Taking a snapshot of the page prevents later changes from discrediting your source.
I am currently working on an elegant solution for displaying Zotero snapshots on crocodyl pages. Ideally, you could upload snapshots of news stories to serve as "clips" then link to them from the body of the company profile text. This way, we could avoid the problem of having links to other web pages change, or at least have a backup source if they did.
I have not seen other websites that integrate this functionality, so it would be a great new feature that would solve a fairly large issue for the online press. Anyone with ideas about an solution, please comment on this post.
Attached is a sample Zotero snapshot, in a zip folder.
