Veteran Curators’ Secret Weapon to Saving Internet Resources

Calling the WayBack Machine! Did you know that the World Wide Web will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its first publicly available website on August 6? Since that historic day in 1991, the number of users, devices, websites, and online content has been increasing daily and is not likely to stop growing any time soon. However, not everything stays alive on the Internet.  For every piece of new information added, older content will go missing whether it’s a website going down – such as an individual blog – or a publisher archiving a newspaper article.

As a curator of web content, how often do you find that a valuable resource link just disappears? What can you do to safeguard the integrity of an original source of information?

Enter the Internet Archive, a digital public library that provides free access to books, web pages, audio recordings, videos, images, and software. Through it’s Wayback Machine, you can enter a URL and look for a previous version of a website or webpage, possibly already archived. 

Users of the Wayback Machine can even ask to index a page for the archive! Wayback addins, extensions, and apps for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Android and iOS assist with the process. For our LiveBinders members, the Wayback Machine offers you the ability to archive valuable resources making your binder content more relevant to your viewers.

Here is an example of how I share a newspaper article archived by the Wayback Machine in my 20th Century Decades Resources LiveBinder.