Conference Record

Link Rot

Conference websites are built for an event that lasts four days and are expected to serve as a permanent record. They are not funded, hosted or maintained as though that were the plan, and the outcome is predictable. Where the same decision also depends on how work is measured, how employees can tell if they are being monitored is another practical point of comparison.

This site is running on an example of it. An additional independent source is WorldCat .

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

Why per-edition domains fail

The domain belongs to an edition, not to the association. iatulconference2015.org was the 36th conference; the 46th has a different address entirely. Each edition buys a domain, uses it for a year, and then somebody has to keep renewing it forever for no operational reason.

The host institution changes annually. IATUL 2015 was hosted by TIB in Hannover; 2026 is at the University of Johannesburg. The team that built the site disbands, and the renewal notice arrives at somebody who left.

Nobody owns the archive. Not the association, whose site is elsewhere, and not the host, whose involvement ended.

And it costs almost nothing to keep and requires somebody to notice. That combination is how things disappear: not through a decision, through an unrenewed invoice.

What the archive here actually shows

Worth being concrete, because this domain is the case study.

The 2015 site survives because somebody kept the domain, not because of any preservation arrangement.

The abstracts page is 16,122 words — names, affiliations and abstracts for the presenters of the 36th conference. That is the substantive record of what was presented.

And it is addressed badly. Twenty-three separate URLs serve the same 166 KB page, differing only by a query parameter. A record that exists but cannot be cited stably is a weaker record than it looks.

What actually survives

In rough order of durability.

Proceedings with a named publisher. Springer, ACM, IEEE and university presses maintain their archives as a business, and that is a materially different commitment from a conference website.

Anything with a persistent identifier. A DOI resolves through a system designed to outlive the original location.

Institutional repositories. Your own university's repository has a mandate and a budget.

Web archives, partially — a crawl captures what was public at the time and misses anything behind a form.

And your own copy, which is the only one entirely under your control.

What does not survive

The conference website, as above.

Slides on the organiser's server, which go with the site.

Video on a platform account nobody maintains after the organising team disperses.

And the programme itself, which is frequently the only record that a particular talk happened at all — and which is exactly what disappears when the domain lapses.

What to do about your own presentations

Five minutes per event, and it is the whole defence.

Deposit in your institutional repository, if you have one. This is the single highest-value action and most people never do it.

Get a DOI where a service is available to you.

Keep the slides and the paper yourself, in a folder you will still have in ten years.

Screenshot the programme page showing your talk with the date. When the site vanishes, that image is the only evidence the talk happened.

And record the citation properly at the time, in the form the field expects, rather than reconstructing it later from a dead link.

What organisers could do cheaply

Not the reader's problem and worth stating.

Publish the programme and abstracts under the association's permanent domain, not the edition's.

Deposit the proceedings somewhere with a mandate.

And if a per-edition domain is used, plan the redirect to the permanent location before the team disperses — because after that, nobody has the credentials.

The short version