Websites change, go away, and get taken down. When they do, linked citations can lead to broken, blank, unintentional, or even malicious pages. This decay is called “link rot.” Perma.cc helps scholars, journals and courts prevent link rot by creating permanent, reliable, unalterable links to the online sources cited in their work. Perma.cc is developed and maintained by the Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with university law libraries across the country and other organizations in the “forever” business.
To preserve web pages with Perma.cc, you need an account. Contact the law library and let us know that you need a perma.cc account for your work as a faculty research assistant and we can create an account for you..
The 20th Edition of The Bluebook Rule 18.2.1(d) states:
“Archiving of Internet sources is encouraged, but only when a reliable archival tool is available. For citations to Internet sources, append the archive URL to the full citation in brackets” – the rule includes the following example:
Letter from Rose M. Oswald Poels, President/CEO, Wis. Bankers Ass’n, to Elizabeth M. Murphy, Sec’y, SEC (Sept. 17, 2013), http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-03-13/s70313-178.pdf [http://perma.cc/B7Z7D9DJ].
Perma.cc is also the example used to demonstrate the archived sources rule in the Rule 18.1 Basic Citation Forms for Internet Sources table on page 179 of The Bluebook:
Rocio Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s Status Debate Continues as Island Marks 61 Years as a Commonwealth, Huffington Post (July 25, 2013, 9:00 AM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/puerto-rico-status-debate_n_3651755.html [http://perma.cc/C6UP-96HN].
Legal research is iterative and non-linear and tracking your research is an important part of the legal research process. Keep a research journal, log, or record of your work. Include the following in your journal:
As part of a cost-effective research strategy, we also recommend making use of the folders on Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg, or downloading material located across resources and filing it in a cloud-based folder. (Note: If you later work in an environment where there are charges associated with viewing or downloading documents such a law firm, saving them to a folder can save you from being charged a second time if you need to view them again in the future.) Make use annotation tools to take note of why you are saving the documents.
Since many research tasks will involve using multiple databases and websites, another useful tool you have access to is Evernote or PowerNotes. With Evernote or PowerNotes, you can gather information from any online resource. You highlight the relevant text, add any wanted annotations and Evernote and PowerNotes will save the content to an online research project, similar to a folder on Westlaw or Lexis. But with Evernote and PowerNotes, you can save content from any website or subscription databases such as Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, HeinOnline, etc. in one place.
As you are adding sources to your research project in Evernote and PowerNotes, an outline will be built for you as you go. As you are working, you can easily restructure your arguments by dragging and dropping sources to move them around within the outline.
When you are ready to start writing, you can download your outline from PowerNotes to Microsoft Word. The download from PowerNotes to Microsoft Word will also include the links to all your sources so you will not forget where the information came from and you have all your citations saved in one place.
Citation management software (or bibliographic management software) allows you to create your own personal library of references to books, articles and documents. References can include citation information (author, title, publisher, etc.) as well as annotations, graphics, and even copies of the documents themselves. These programs work with Microsoft Word and other word processors to automatically add references to your paper and format your bibliography in Bluebook style--though do not assume precise citation format accuracy; you may need to manually edit citations that will appear in a published paper.
