By: Charles Bowen As the Web approaches its 10th anniversary next year, chances are that someone at your paper will want to do one or more Internet retrospectives. And in the process, reporters and editors will have another opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of the Internet. After all, if the Net were left to its own devices, documenting the first Web decade might have been difficult indeed.
Digital documents are quite ephemeral. Nothing's as dead as last year's Web site, and eager-to-please Webmasters are forever zapping into oblivion their old pages and replacing them with new ones that incorporate all the latest Java scripts and Shockwave technology. Servers that fill up are cleaned up for new space.
So with all this zapping and replacing, what's a post-Web historian to do? There's no "paper trail" to follow. There's no great graveyard of historic homepages.
Or
is there? A site called the Internet Archive has been quietly cataloging Web pages since its inception in 1996 and now, for its fifth anniversary, it has opened the archive to the public by launching its new "Wayback Machine." To operate the service, simply enter a URL into the search box, which will summon dated, archived pages of that site. The Internet Archive holds an incredible 10 billion Web pages, making it the largest known database online. It is a nonprofit site, which has received funding from a number of sources including the Library of Congress and the National Science Foundation.
To use the resource, visit the site at
http://www.archive.org, where a link to the Wayback Machine is provided at the top of the display. Click the graphic to reach a page with a simple data entry box. Enter a URL to see what is stored in the site's massive archives for that Web site address. The hyperlinked results are arranged by date, making it easy to go directly to the earliest entries.
The feature also has rather detailed advanced search options. Click the "Advanced Search" link adjacent to the data entry box to reach a screen you can use to set a range of dates to target your search. You also can set conditions on whether and/or how to display aliases, redirects, and duplicate pages.
At this writing, the service -- introduced Oct. 24 -- was a bit slow because so many people wanted in to look around. Initially, at least, they were getting 50 to 100 requests a second. Developers acknowledge they were taken by surprise. "It's just a library," archive founder Brewster Kahle told
USA Today recently. "People won't storm the doors of a library." Backers immediately began adding more servers to handle the demand for surfing the past.
Other services in the Internet Archive of interest to writers and editors:
1. The archive usually has "special collections" linked from its introductory screen. For instance, the site currently has links to Web pages on the Sept. 11 attacks, a "Web Pioneers" collection of sites that played roles in the early Internet, and Election 2000 sites, covering one of the more controversial elections in the U.S. history.
2. The site recently launched a collection of rare films that can be downloaded from the Net. These include more than a thousand films created by the government and business industry covering everyday life, culture, business, and institutions in the 20th century. They range from home movies of the Golden Gate International Exhibition in 1939 to relief efforts for the 1937 flood on the Ohio River.
3. A sister site -- Television Archive (www.televisionarchive.org) -- has just launched. Its first collection contains TV news from around the world concerning events of Sept. 11. You can watch broadcasts, read critical commentary, and see differing perspectives in the coverage.
To see Bowen's last 10 columns,
click here. Previous columns may be purchased in our
paid archives. Search for "Bowen" in the "Author" field.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here