Back in the day, when I worked with my students who were building websites for clients, the conventional wisdom was to build in-house capacity in terms of information. This meant that they would do the research and collect the information needed and make it their own. They were not advised to link out to dynamic sites with relevant information because these sites could change their contents at any time. They could take a political turn that the students might not want. The linking would involve gaining permissions - as a courtesy. Also, the linking would mean regular work into the future to check on the quality and liveness of the linked sites.

The caching of websites by various aggregators and search engines now has changed that advice to a degree. The WWW has become more stable, and the caching may preserve materials and information that the original site creator may have moved or discontinued or put behind password protection.

In any day's search though, one still runs up against dead links and missing files.

The advice today probably still would be to glean the important information and to surface original research and insights...for one's own site...in-house.But it may be a good idea to keep scanning the environment for resources and changes and selecting for quality for at least some of the links.

After all, there are some sites with the intellect, talent, funds and leadership that one cannot recreate or trump, and in those cases, the capacity has to be from outside rather than within.