Preserving Open Data

The Wayback Machine is a web archive run by the Internet Archive that has saved over 916 billion web pages, some dating back as far as 1996. By entering a URL or specific keywords into the search box, you can access archived versions of websites that the Internet Archive has crawled. If you are concerned about a website changing or becoming inaccessible, you can use their “Save Page Now” tool to submit a URL to be crawled. This will capture the web page as it appears now. 

If you are looking for archived website information, but you do not have a URL, you can try searching through their collections. These collections include, but are not limited to: .gov PDFs, .gov web pages, and COVID information.

Some of the resources in this subject guide link to archived versions of websites. You can tell that you are viewing a website on the Wayback Machine two different ways:

1. The URL will begin with: "https://web.archive.org/web/", followed by a string of numbers representing the date the website was crawled, then the original URL for the website.
   For example, the URL https://web.archive.org/web/20121113204310/http://library.augsburg.edu/ is a link to Lindell Library's website on the 13th of November, 2012.
2. An interactive timeline of website snapshots will be present at the top of the page:

Not only do these clues show that you are on the Wayback Machine, they also let you know the exact date the snapshot was taken. By switching between dates using the timeline, you can compare versions and identify when changes have been made.

For more information about how to use the Wayback Machine, visit their help page or contact Kira Cronin-Hennessy at Augsburg.

After retrieving information from the Wayback Machine, citing your source can be confusing. 

The Chicago Manual of Style has instructions in their online FAQ.

The MLA Style Center has instructions on their website.

APA does not currently have instructions for citing the Wayback Machine on their website. You can use the Wayback Machine URL in the "Retrieved from:" section of your citation. 

AMA does not currently have instructions for citing the Wayback Machine. Here is a good place to start to understand what information is important to include in a citation when it comes to archived webpages.

If you have any questions about citing website archives, feel free to reach out to our librarians for help!

Can't find what you need on the Wayback Machine? While it is the largest and most popular web archive, other similar projects do exist and may have saved websites that the Wayback Machine has not.