Users need some sort of guarantee that the service is going to stick around before they move to adopt it. Government could be a means to that end by helping to provide or even fund a dedicated archive either for general use or very specific databases / user groups.

For now, I think there’s some urgency to the matter since short URLs seem poised to become something of a normalized fad. It may be more difficult in future to question their use. All the more reason to “co-opt” them, so to speak.

@Ian Thanks!

I wonder if the US Library of Congress has enough space in their archive to copy the full link and even the page it leads to — after all, the price of digital storage has fallen significantly in recent years.

On the other hand, bit.ly (and other popular stand-alone services) are likely to be purchased and absorbed into broader platforms (maybe even Twitter itself). That might raise ownership problems and hinder the LOC’s archival efforts.

Brenton’s comment made me think of the recent announcement that the American Library of Congress is archiving Twitter tweets – and what a neat source that’ll be for a future historian. Of course, everybody uses URL shortening services for Twitter… and if bit.ly fails, the utility of the archive could be considerably diminished. I guess you’d have to preserve the long URL and hope that you could cross-reference it with the Internet Archive.

You know, I suspected there were others out there with similar views on this. And I had no idea that British Archaeology was already printing tinyurl.com links. That’s a bit disconcerting. I wonder why they didn’t just launch their own service… (not very archaeological of them!).

Is this a service that scholarly societies could usefully provide?