Ever click on a link, only to find the page no longer exists, or redirects to a completely different website than you were expecting? Or click on the link to a source in an article you're using to find research paper sources, but the link's broken? Wonder how researchers, or people who are just curious, can look at old websites as they used to be, or include permanent links in citations?
Web archiving creates a snapshot of a website as it looked, felt, and worked at a given moment in time. With web archiving, you can save and replicate the look and feel of a website at the time you captured or archived it, so information isn’t lost if the original site changes, is taken down, or someone forgets to pay the hosting fees.
The Library has been archiving websites since 2007. Archived websites span a wide variety of subjects, including University Archives, Chinese Studies, local and federal government, and events of local or campus impact. They also include a variety of content types, from plain text to embedded audio and video.
Since 2015, the Library has used the Internet Archive’s Archive-it service as our primary web archiving tool. Captured websites are included in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. There are also other tools that the Library (and anyone else) can use to archive websites and web pages to ensure future access.
The Library's publicly available web archive collections can be found here.
Interested in learning more about web archives? Check out these resources!
