I was a reference librarian at the public library in Duluth, Minnesota, for forty-one years, from 1953 until I retired in 1994. A reference librarian answers questions for a living. Where is Ulan Bator? What was the population of St. Louis County in 1910? Is there a book that tells how to fix a 1962 outboard motor? You find the answer, and then you show the person where you found it, so they can find it again without you.

And you weed. Every library has books on the shelf that are wrong now: the atlas with countries that aren't there anymore, the car repair manual for cars nobody drives. You take them off the shelf, because a library that hands people wrong answers is worse than no library at all.

My grandson set up a computer for me in January. Within a week I'd noticed that a good many of the links on people's home pages lead nowhere. Within two weeks I'd started keeping track. My husband Elwood says I've simply found a way to keep working without having to find a parking place downtown. He isn't wrong.

So this is the Dead Link Patrol. I read the links pages on people's home pages, I click every link, and when one has died, I write the owner a polite note telling them which one, what I found there, and when. That's all. I don't charge anything and I don't want anything, except for the Web to be a little more like a well-kept library.

A link is only an address, and addresses go out of date. "Link rot" is the name people have given to the way the links on a page die off, one by one, while the page itself sits there looking exactly as it did. In my experience there are three causes.

The host closes. Some free home page services, and some small Internet companies, have simply shut their doors, and every page they kept went with them, overnight, with no forwarding address for anybody.

People move. They change Internet companies and their old address goes with the old account. They graduate from college and the college closes their student pages. They change jobs. A page that lived for three years at one address turns up at another, or doesn't turn up at all.

People stop. The most common cause, and the saddest. Somebody made a lovely page about lighthouses in 1996, and then life happened, and one day the page was taken down, or the account lapsed. Nobody tells the people who linked to it.

What a dead link looks like when you click it. I check every one twice, a day apart, before I call it dead, because servers have bad nights the same as people do.

1. "404 Not Found." The computer at that address answered, but the page isn't there. Usually the owner renamed it, moved it into a folder, or took it down. The most common kind, nearly half of all the dead links I find.

2. The server can't be found. Netscape says it is "unable to locate the server," and Internet Explorer says "The page cannot be displayed." There's no computer at that address at all anymore. When the whole host has closed, this is what you see.

3. "I've moved!" A page that says the site has moved, and doesn't say where. I have seen dozens of these. Some of them have a little picture of a moving van. Not one has had the new address on it. I don't know what people are thinking.

4. Everything else. A page that's empty, or asks for a password, or says "under construction" and has said so, by its own date, since 1997.

I keep a ledger, the way I kept the reference desk tally for forty-one years. Since the first week of January I have checked the links pages of 212 home pages, 3,940 links in all. Here they are by month.

656 dead out of 3,940 is 16.6 percent, or just about one link in six. It has held close to that every month. Here is what the dead ones looked like:

Of the 212 pages, 158 had at least one dead link, and each of those owners got one note from me, listing all of that page's dead links at once. 71 wrote back. When I checked again a month later, 83 of the 158 pages had been fixed, so a good many people fix it without a word, which is perfectly all right with me. The oldest links are the likeliest to be dead. On pages that say they were last updated in 1997 or before, it's closer to one in three.

I never name the pages. Not here, not anywhere. A dead link is nothing to be ashamed of. It's what happens to every links page that's left alone long enough.

1. Click every link once a month. The first of the month is easy to remember. On a links page of thirty, it takes ten minutes. Take the dead ones down, or find where they went.

2. Say what's at each link. Not "click here." Not just a name. Write a line describing what the visitor will find: "Photographs of every lighthouse on Lake Superior, with directions." Then when the link dies, your reader still knows what was there and can look for it, and when you check the link, you'll know whether you've arrived at the right place or at something else entirely that's moved into the address.

3. Note the month you last checked. One line at the top or bottom of your links page: "Links checked September 1999." It tells your visitors how fresh the list is, and it reminds you. Tim Lomeli's link exchange, The Button Wall, says right on the page that he clicks every button on the first Sunday of every month, and when I checked his links, every one worked. That is what a well-kept links page looks like.

4. When you move, leave a forwarding address. If you change the name of a page or move to a new address, leave a little page behind at the old address that sends people along. A line in the head of the page called a META refresh does it: it tells the browser to wait a few seconds and then go to the new page by itself. Always put an ordinary link on the page too, for browsers that don't do it. Here's the one I'd leave if I ever renamed my own links page:

<html>
<head>
<title>This page has moved</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
 content="15; URL=links.html">
</head>
<body>
<p>My links page has moved to
<a href="links.html">a new
address</a>. If you are not
taken there in 15 seconds,
please click the link, and
change your bookmark.</p>
</body>
</html>

The 15 is how many seconds to wait before going. Give people long enough to read the page. If you're moving to a whole new address, put the new address after URL= in full, starting with http://, all on one line, and put the same address in the link. Then leave that little page up for at least a year.

My letter to webmasters: the note I send, ready to copy if you'd like to join the Patrol yourself, with a few of the replies I've had.

If you'd like me to look over your own links page, write and send me the address. I'll get to it within the month, and I'll tell you what I find, good and bad. Mostly good. Most of the pages I visit are lovely.

Sincerely,
Jean Guy
Duluth, Minnesota
[email protected]

Patrons since February 1999: