When I worked for SCIS one of my roles was to recieve a huge printout of deadlinks and go through them and update links. As I quickly learned many links particularly by Government and its agencies could be archived and moved.

The dilemma that we had was that although we could update our records for future catalogue downloads, we could not replace links that were already on subscriber catalogues. We had to recomend that they used their own linkchecker service to alert them to deadlinks.

Now as a practioner I am going through my School Library catalogue, subject by subject, and investigating over 18000 weblinks that our catalogue has accumulated. This is my working from home penance and incredibly tedious although strangely soothing.

The deletion criteria from the boss as follows

1. Dead links
2. ‘Page no longer available’ links
3. Duplicates
4. Wikipedia links
5. Crappy websites with lots of ads and little content
6. Other sites you think are not educational enough
7. When in doubt delete!

I also look at currency

Our LMS does not provide us with a dead link checker. Fifteen thousand of these links were on our previous LMS when we shifted to our present cloud based provider. How did we get here?

We continued to subsribe to a Weblink service. We have now cancelled that subscription while we sort out the mess that our weblinks have become. So many dead links, so many duplications and crappy non educatonal sites. This section of our catalogue has become flabby and unfocused. We need to cull and assume quality control again.

I’ve always advocated for weblinks as part of a 24/7 accessible catalogue. How we all worked to achieve this to try and provide relevancy to our users. I don’t believe that we should go back to our subscription service but after a thorough cull we should choose our own online resources / weblinks to suit the educational and recreational needs of our Teachers and students.

SCIS provide a good website service in their Connections magazine by Nigel Paull and Larry Ferlazzo Websites of the day is also a good source.

Website and app reviews

https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/