Permanently archived copy field for all items with URLs

Oby

As permanent archives of URLs is catching on, to prevent "link rot", Zotero should support the storage and citation of these permanent URLs to library items. Examples of such services include the brilliant http://perma.cc

Many item types in Zotero today have an URL field, which is used to store the original URL of an item, which can potentially be swapped with the permanent URL.

However, this is not a good solution. For example, some citation styles mandate the use of both URLs when citing. E.g. (two different styles):
- "President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President on the Economy at Georgetown
University (Apr. 14, 2009) (transcript archived at http://perma.cc/9WCB-F3YF)", or
- "..., available at http://www.law.columbia.edu/media_inquiries/news_events/2011/february2011/timwu-ftc, [http://perma.cc/0eJPozLdPuk]"

There might also be other reasons for storing the original URL. For instance if the original URL is not given by the permanent archive.

I hope this can be worked into the roadmap for Zotero, or possibly upstream if CSL does not already define such a field. If this should have been posted somewhere upstream, please tell me and I would be happy to comply :-)

adamsmith

From the CSL side, I'm disinclined to go with this before it becomes more mainstream. I'm seeing very, very little reference to this in published citation guides at this point and can imagine actual citation conventions addressing this in various ways.

feltpants

I think adding the capacity for permanent URLs would be very useful.

As a stop-gap measure, at least including a field for "archive URL" when creating a website citation would be very useful!

Krause,Katja

I agree. It would be very useful to have an additional field for permanent links.

konradlischka

I agree. This would be very useful!

adamsmith

I think the trend would actually be to _not_ store this information separately. There is a protocol, supported by all major archiving solutions, that is able to find archived copies from a URL: https://mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ which seems like the right way to solve this in the long run (see http://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/ for a possible implementation)

There's a currently dormant program that forces archiving of all articles saved to Zotero: https://github.com/hiberlink/zotero_hiberlink that seems like a good idea to me.