- Austrian Red Cross
- Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD)
- Wiedner Hauptstraße 32, 1041 Wien
- T +43 1 589 00 583
- F +43 1 589 00 589
- info@ecoi.net
We are happy to say: we are online since June 2001!
In 2001, 25 years ago, Wikipedia was founded, Google was two years old, still three years until Facebook went online, four until YouTube started its online presence. In June 2001, another platform quietly went online: ecoi.net. Twenty-five years later, it’s still here, with the same web address and the same mission.
The Internet of 2001, the place where ecoi.net took its first steps, was a very different place. It was slower and smaller and still in its very early stages of development as a significant tool for research and knowledge sharing. In other words, whether a specialised database could reach a global audience was far from a given. Nevertheless, these steps traced the path of a quiet success story, and quite an impressive one within the niche but vital universe of the COI community.
In this blog post, we explore what permanence means in an internet landscape defined by flux, and why maintaining it requires effort. We also consider where the value of human curation lies, and how to interpret these values against new developments around Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the information environment. Above all, however, with this blog post we celebrate ecoi.net and the dedicated team that have kept it alive and relevant, and made it invaluable for the COI community. Twenty-five years is a long time for anything on the internet. It is worth asking what it actually takes and what it actually means.
We are all familiar with the phrase “the internet does not forget”, at least when it comes to handling data from a privacy perspective, when it comes to private photos or postings sent in a moment of temporary lapse in judgement 😉. However, there is another side to this coin: the internet does indeed forget. At least those things we might actually want to preserve. “404 Not Found” – looks familiar?
In this context we are talking about broken links, dead links, link rot or link decay. In a 2014 scholarly publication on the problem of link and reference rot in legal citations, the authors state that “[t]he rise of the Web has enabled the creation and exchange of scholarly knowledge and the sources on which it is based”, while simultaneously “bypass[ing] the libraries that previously vouchsafed the long-term preservation of those sources” (Zittrain et al. 2014, p.182). The article describes how online sources have made it considerably easier for readers to trace and retrieve referenced material, while at the same time making availability entirely dependent on the host of that information, since the resources “will only survive so as long as the third party preserves it” (Zittrain et al. 2014, p. 165). Already in 2014, the study found that over 50% of the URLs within all published U.S. Supreme Court opinions “suffer reference rot” (Zittrain et al. 2014, p.166-167).
Another longitudinal study published in 2025, employing a quantitative approach to examine web citation decay in literature from the field of Library and Information Science found that web citations are decaying exponentially, “with accessibility dropping from 87% for citations 0–5 years old to 38% for those over 10 years old. Furthermore, permanent link rot has tripled from 5% in 2012 to 15% in 2025” (Sadatmoosavi et al. 2025, p.1), depicting “critical gaps in our collective scholarly memory that may never be filled” (Sadatmoosavi et al. 2025, p.11). This means that links can disappear at any time, which undermines the scholarly foundation and traceability of any text that relies on them. Some form of archiving is therefore essential for anyone who aims to work with scientific rigour. Translated into COI terms: Without some form of archiving, the COI standard of transparency, i.e. traceability, is at stake, since “traceability is achieved when every piece of information gathered from a source is referenced as such, enabling readers to independently trace, verify and assess the information provided” (ACCORD 2024, p.41). The stakes here are not abstract. In international protection procedures, a COI finding that cannot be traced to a verifiable source can be challenged and even dismissed. An unreachable link is not only a technical inconvenience. For a decision-maker, it is a gap in the evidentiary foundation of a protection decision. ecoi.net’s stable permalinks and summaries are not incidental features of the database. They are what makes the work accountable.
So, the internet does forget. Little by little – and perhaps precisely the things we actually want to preserve. Given this fact, it is by no means obvious that a database remains reliably citable over a period of 25 years. It takes effort, and it helps ensure adherence to established COI standards. ecoi.net does not offer full archiving for all its documents, since not all documents may be republished within our database. However, ecoi.net provides a form of curatorial memory by offering a stable reference point that lasts: full text where permitted and a summary and permalink always.
Permanence, however, is not the only factor that makes ecoi.net the valuable resource it is today. Rather, it is its long history of curatorial work. This involves source selection, source descriptions, source coverage based on meaningful yet adaptable relevance criteria, metadata verification, provision of summaries and establishing country priorities. All this work and all these curation decisions are carried out and made by specialists who know their field, understand where COI begins and where it ends, and who have a deep understanding of source evaluation.
Library and Information Science, the discipline that has thought longest and hardest about these questions, offers a useful concept here. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy states that “authority is constructed and contextual”, that “[i]nformation resources reflect their creators’ expertise and credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which the information will be used” (ACRL, p.12). In other words, not all sources are equally important in a specific context, and recognising the difference requires judgment. A database is a curated collection with memory, built on exactly that kind of contextual expertise. The difference becomes clear in contrast: a search engine shows what exists now, ranked by algorithms that optimise for relevance in the broadest sense. ecoi.net preserves and structures information over time: selected, described, and assessed by people who understand the specific information needs of the COI community.
And this is not just a side issue for COI quality standards, it is fundamental to them. Meeting the quality criteria of relevance and reliability set out in the ACCORD Manual cannot be reduced to solely automated processes. Relevance requires an understanding of what a COI researcher might actually look for, of what a decision-maker might actually need. Reliability requires critically evaluating a source, understanding its background, making its potential bias and its limitations transparent. And then there’s the research principle of using public information: “To support fair procedures, publicly available information should be used. Public information is open to review and scrutiny by the applicant, experts, and the public at large” (ACCORD 2024, p. 44). ecoi.net takes this principle seriously in two ways: it covers almost exclusively publicly available sources, and the database itself is freely accessible. This matters because COI quality depends not only on finding relevant information, but on making it possible for others to consult and verify that information independently.
It is worth pausing here. The argument that human judgement is essential to COI quality is precisely the one that generative AI appears to complicate. If AI can find and summarise information efficiently, what does that leave for a specialised, human-curated database? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Generative AI is reshaping the online information environment at high speed, and beyond the broader implications we have explored elsewhere, one specific consequence of this development deserves attention here: AI models generate outputs based on training data that is largely opaque to users, and on statistical inference that produces a different response to the same prompt every time. There is no stable reference point, no reproducible output. And this is before we even get into the issue of AI hallucinations. In COI terms, this matters enormously: an output that cannot be reproduced cannot be cited, and information that cannot be cited cannot meet the traceability standard that COI quality requires. A human-curated database that has existed for a quarter of a century is, in this sense, the diametrical opposite: its sources are transparent, its outputs stable, and its entire architecture is built on the premise that information must not only be found: it must be found again, in the same form, with its origins intact.
All of the above, permanence, curation, reproducibility, are arguments highlighting the value of ecoi.net from a more theoretical viewpoint. But there is another kind of evidence: what the people who actually use ecoi.net say about it. One year ago, we conducted a user survey. At this point, we would like to thank everyone who took the time to participate. Thanks! The 2025 survey gives us valuable insight into how ecoi.net is used, by whom, and for what purposes. In total, 354 users completed the survey in full, with a further 264 completing it partially. The results confirm that ecoi.net is not only used regularly, but by a broad range of user groups: government authorities and courts (47%), lawyers and legal counsel assisting refugees and asylum seekers (16%), NGOs dealing with international protection (12%), international organisations (4%) and academic users (5%). What stands out in the frequency-of-use responses is that, for many respondents, ecoi.net appears to be more than an occasional reference point, with daily and weekly use accounting for a substantial share of responses. The survey also shows that users assess ecoi.net positively in comparison with other COI sources, particularly in terms of overall satisfaction.
This feedback is encouraging, not only because it is positive, but because it points to what users actually value in the database. Respondents are generally very satisfied or satisfied with general usability, up-to-dateness, its search and navigation. At the same time, the survey points to areas where users would like to see more coverage, for example, on health care data and specific events or incidents. Some respondents also mentioned specific countries and regions, including Africa, Somalia and South Sudan, where additional coverage would be welcomed. Taken together, these responses are a reminder that usefulness is not static, but depends on changing information needs and the concrete questions users are confronted with in their daily work.
Users called ecoi.net “super useful”, “essential” and “indispensable”. We are grateful for this feedback not because it is flattering – although of course it is!! 😊 – but because it shows where the database becomes part of actual COI practice. After 25 years, this may be the clearest measure of ecoi.net’s value. Not only has it stayed online, it has also remained useful in the everyday work of people who need country of origin information to be accessible, traceable and reliable.
Sources:
ecoi.net is run by the Austrian Red Cross (department ACCORD) in cooperation with Informationsverbund Asyl & Migration. ecoi.net is funded by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior and Caritas Austria. ecoi.net is supported by ECRE & UNHCR.
