Social media content has grown exponentially in the recent years and the role of social media has evolved from just narrating life events to actually shaping them. In this paper we explore how many resources shared in social media are still available on the live web or in public web archives. By analyzing six different event-centric datasets of resources shared in social media in the period from June 2009 to March 2012, we found about 11 lost and 20 archived after just a year and an average of 27 lost and 41 archived after two and a half years. Furthermore, we found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11 of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02 per day.
Further more, many concerns were raised about the persistence of shared resources and web content in general. Nelson and Allen studied the persistence of objects in a digital library and found that, with just over a year, 3 web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories using Memento and found that 28 of the web is archived and found it ranges from 16 on the starting seed URIs. examined the factors affecting reconstructing websites (using caches and archives) and found that PageRank, Age, and the number of hops from the top-level of the site were most influential @cite_2 .
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In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content, has a bearing on the availability of the web resources cited by that content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the referenced URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45 (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28 of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.