Perma.cc Guide & Policies: Explanation, Policies, and Best Practices

The University of South Carolina Law Library has an institutional account with Perma.cc.  This means that the law library can sponsor individual user accounts of faculty, staff, or students affiliated with the USC Rice School.  Sponsorship by an academic institution simply means that the user does not have a monthly limit on their Perma captures. Only the individual sponsored user and the law library "registrars" have access to the content of a sponsored account.

Perma can also be used to create sponsored organizations.  Once the organization is created, one or more faculty, staff, and students can be associated with it, making it perfect cooperative work that requires access by multiple people.  For example, an organization might include a faculty member and their research assistants, the members of a student group such as the editorial board of a law journal, or even all of the faculty support staff assisting faculty prepare scholarship for publication.

The roster of the users and organizations sponsored by a given institution is controlled by the account's "registrars" who have the power to create associated organizations and add and remove users.  Registrars are automatically members of all of an account's organizations.  The USC law library's registrars are some of its librarians.

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives the content of the referenced web page and generates a link to the archived record of the page. Regardless of what happens to the original source, the archived record will always be available through its Perma.cc link.

See the individual instruction pages for more information on how to use Perma.

Bluebook Rule  18.2.1(d) encourages archiving Internet sources in order to prevent link rot, using both the Perma Link and original URL in the citation.  A citation would look like this: 

Charles P. Pierce, This Cannot Be the Way Occupy Ends, Esquire: Pol. Blog (Nov. 17, 2011), http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/occupy-wall-street-violence-6575448 [http://perma.cc/48VC-ZS62].

Perma.cc Policies

1. The library's institutional Perma.cc account is for the use of our faculty, staff, students, and journals.
2. Faculty and journal editors involved in organizations are responsible for their Perma.cc content and should consider carefully who should be given access to the 'organization's' files.
3. Faculty and journal editors are responsible for keeping the rosters of their organizations up-to-date and should disassociate any users who should no longer be affiliated with the organization.
4. The library's Perma.cc registrars will periodically review the roster of users and remove anyone who is no longer faculty, staff, or student of the law school as more fully explained on the specific tabs for that user type.  Additionally, the library's Perma.cc registrar may remove any users who have not used Perma.cc in over three years or who use Perma inappropriately.
5. As long as a link is public, it will continue to be visible regardless of the separation or removal of users from an organization or institutional sponsorship. However users, once separated, will only have access to their personal folders and, prior to separation, may wish to make note of any Perma URL's they wish to remember.
6. Users can move links from organizational folders to their personal folders, but should only do so if the link was mistakenly placed in the wrong folder originally.  Moving the link out of the organizational folder prevents other organization users from being able to access it.

• Use the folders ability to organize your Permalinks.
• Always check your Permalinks to make sure they captured what you want, especially if you batch upload a list.
• You can't archive something behind an authentication wall; a screen capture will need to be uploaded to Perma and a link made to that image.