The web's area-code should be 404

Issues of permanence come up again and again for even the casual user of web spaces. Today, though, I ran across an illustrative instance in which the problem (and its seriousness) seems aptly demonstrated.

Earlier, while checking in with the ELO and reading some of N. Katherine Hayles' work, I decided to go visit her webpage that accompanies her most recent publication, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. I clicked through to the site that is linked from the ELO homepage, and double-checked the site address with the one published in the hard-copy text.

Sadly, this is what I got:
The "Site Temporarily Unavailable" page.

This is, probably, just a fluke. I visited Hayles' page a couple of weeks ago without any problems. But the fact that the ubiquitous "try again" page shows up even among the work of the most diligent digital scholars is disconcerting to say the least. There are problems with digital scholarship, as we all know. I think that sometimes it is easy to get into a hopeful mindset about these problems, thinking that they will "be fixed" soon enough. But I don't know that that is the case with this particular problem of location and fixability. There are tons of people out there writing on the issue now, so I'll leave it up to you to go seek them out. I certainly don't have a solution.