I’m thinking of teaching an odd course I taught five years ago, a course essentially in a single play Tom Stoppard’s THE INVENTION OF LOVE, which requires familiarity with A.E Housman’s poetry and classical scholarship, Oscar Wilde’s work, a fair grounding in classical poetry, and several other things that will keep an undergraduate lit class occupied fully for a semester.
But in reviewing the material I taught this stuff through last time around, many critical links just don’t work anymore. I had a site that bookmarked a thorough glossary to the Stoppard play, which is thick with references to 19th century England and classical culture: gone! I had a site that was great at helping students translate word-by-word Latin, so they could try their hand at figuring out how to re-arrange the syntax of Roman poetry: also gone (I can’t even find the link itself anymore).
I’m pissed because I’d done a lot of work in constructing this complicated course, and I thought I wouldn’t need to do it again this time around. Should I have simply copied the material inside the links? Since I’ll want to to credit t he authors with the material, should I copy down the lilnk itself, which may or may not work in the future? Anyone who uses materials from the Web frequently may have a solution to my problem: I’m just not sure how to store reliably material I find on the Internet at this point.