Recently, I’ve had a personal brush with disappearing data. In my case, it wasn’t economic or public health data, it was the link to a written work that served as the evidence I had been published.
I knew Public Broadcasting budget cuts had impacted decimated a digital magazine affiliated with Minnesota Public Radio called Next Avenue. A fellow writer (thank you Judith Shapiro) alerted me to the fact that the links to our work were no longer functioning, in my case a link I used on my website’s publication clips page.
Enter the Wayback Machine. I was lucky, when I entered the original URL of my piece I found three archived copies of the work, which means I could replace the broken link with one from the archive.
My story is a small one, and hardly a tragedy. I wish I could say the same for all of the disappearing data. Check your links. Maybe you’ll get lucky too.