Oregon Legal Research Blog
The Internet Archive serves as, among other things, a repository for webpages. Lawyers (especially), historians (always), librarians (of course), and everyone else can save their webpages to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (Ue their Save Link Now box.)
I save many of URLs I link to in my blog posts and am frequently astounded to find that too few of those URLs have been saved to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These government, nonprofit, NGO, official document, and other URLs should be preserved in the Archive.
If you build, update, rely on website content, please SAVE the URL to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Websites come and go and you never know when you might need to reconstruct, recall, provide evidence based on, or otherwise want to view a retrospective snapshot of a particular website.
Sometimes the website will have been archived by the Archives’ own travels through the interwebs (!), but the Wayback Machine also depends on YOU to SAVE website URLs.
So, if you put a lot of work into a website, come across one that provides invaluable information, if you think a particular website’s content is going to be removed … please take a few seconds and SAVE that URL to the Internet Archive.
It’s easy! I break the process down into 5 steps, which usually take no more than 10-15 seconds to complete:
- Copy the URL you want to SAVE.
- Link to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
- Enter the URL in the Save Page Now box.
- Watch the page being loaded into the Archive.
- You’re done when you see the “Capture” timeline displayed, which shows how many times the page has been uploaded to the Archive.
Voila! You’ve done a good deed and saved a piece of internet history. Thank you!