Document constancy and persistence: A study of web pages in library and information science domain

Abstract

A selection of ninety English language library and information science organization Web sites and their associated pages are analyzed. A majority of Web sites are located on the.org generic top-level domain or the country code top-level domain of the country of origin (to include.int). The Web sites and pages were monitored for ninetyone days beginning November 2, 2010. The data suggest that while Web sites may fluctuate in size on a day to day basis, there is a general tendency toward accretion of pages. Web pages on these organizational Web sites appear to be more persistent than on the Web in general. There is significant variation in constancy as measured by the cosine similarity algorithm.