The WayBackMachine

Welcome to the Internet Archive!

“The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”

The neatest feature of this site:

“Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.”

A perfect example of the WayBackMachine in use: I wanted students to go to this site:

http://careers.asia1.com.sg/st_recruit/r20050508.html

But I got the not-so-wonderful “Server Not Found” page.

So, I headed over to the WayBackMachine, put the address in and hit the ‘Take Me Back’ button. The page was archived once, in May of 2005. Click on the link…

May 10, 2005

…And there it is! The article I wanted on ‘The Future of Work’ for my class. It had � symbols instead of some punctuation… but what a wonderful opportunity to find those once lost-for-ever links!

- – - – -

Lesson Idea: From ‘cool’ factor to ‘fear factor’.

The WayBackMachine can be used as a valuable lesson! Use it as a reminder to students that once they put something on the net, it could be around much longer than they think.

What secrets could I dig up about you?