> a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, "more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information." [1]
I doubt that the US Supreme Court was regularly losing track of cited documents before "information technology" came along. A lot of documents may be recoverable even if the original URLs are broken, but is this really the best we can do to manage information in the information age?