What do you want to know about the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive web archive? Do you have problems, concerns, suggestions? This is the place!

If your comment is a question, please check the classic Wayback Machine Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) or new Wayback Machine FAQ site to see if your question has already been addressed before posting.

A few other things to note before posting:

• This is not the place for requesting that a site be archived, unless the site is in imminent danger of being taken down. See the FAQ How can I get my site included in the Wayback Machine? for more info.
• This is not the place for requesting content be removed from the Wayback Machine. See the FAQ How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine? for more info.

Everything else? Fire away!

http://waybackmachine.org

Note that during the beta test period, the availability and functionality of the new service will fluctuate as issues are discovered and addressed.

The classic Wayback Machine will remain in concurrent operation for a period, for comparing functionality, but may not receive any further index updates. (It received its last major update in 2008, with only small piecemeal updates since.) So, please use the new site for accessing material from recent years. For a mixture of technical and policy reasons, most material will still appear 6 months or more after collection.

For more information, see the new Wayback Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) site.

Thank you for your patience while this long-awaited update was under development!

If your comment is a question, please check the Wayback Machine Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) to see if your question has already been addressed there before posting.

Also, I’m about to shut down the older forum, which has been very hard to guard against spam and search/link – so we may see an influx of new commenters here.

A few key things to note before you post:

• This is not the place for requesting that a site be archived, unless the site is in imminent danger of being taken down. See the FAQ How can I get my site included in the Wayback Machine? for more info.
• This is not the place for requesting content be removed from the Wayback Machine. See the FAQ How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine? for more info.

Everything else? Fire away!

(The next new open thread should be started in January.)

What do you want to know about the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive web archive? Do you have problems, concerns, suggestions? This is the place!

If your comment is a question, please check the Wayback Machine Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) to see if your question has already been addressed before posting.

A few other things to note before posting:

• This is not the place for requesting that a site be archived, unless the site is in imminent danger of being taken down. See the FAQ How can I get my site included in the Wayback Machine? for more info.
• This is not the place for requesting content be removed from the Wayback Machine. See the FAQ How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine? for more info.

Everything else? Fire away!

We’re trying something new here. Our classic forum is a bit clunky by modern discussion standards. For posters, it’s hard to browse or search the archives, leading to a lot of repetitive questions. For IA staff, the options for participation and moderation are limited.

This is the first of what’s planned as a new  ‘open thread’ each month, here on this blog. For the month, it’s where feedback, discussion, and questions about the web archive and Wayback Machine should be directed.

If your comment is a question, please check the Wayback Machine Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) to see if your question has already been addressed before posting.

A few other things to note before posting:

• This is not the place for requesting a site be archived, unless the site is in imminent danger of being taken down. See the FAQ How can I get my site included in the Wayback Machine? for more info.
• This is not the place for requesting content be removed from the Wayback Machine. See the FAQ How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine? for more info.

Everything else? Fire away!

If you are interested in learning more about the Archive-It/LOCKSS partnership, please contact the LOCKSS team lockss-support (at) lockss (dot) org or the Archive-It team (http://www.archive-it.org/public/contact-us)

The Archive-It team would like to partner with additional preservation systems and needs to hear from our partners. If your institution is interested in participating in a pilot for the preservation system you use, please contact the Archive-It team and let us know. We have done a pilot with iRODS and are in the middle of a test with CONTENTdm.

By crawling Governor Palin and Lt. Governor Parnell’s websites on the eve of the transition of power, the Alaska State Library was able to capture information that is now offline.  Once Sarah Palin left office, the governor’s website changed to reflect Sean Parnell as governor, and the lieutenant governor’s website changed to reflect Craig Campbell as lieutenant governor. The information from former Governor Palin’s website as well as speeches and press releases from Sean Parnell’s time as lieutenant governor are no longer available on the live web. The foresight of the staff of the Alaska State Library and on-demand crawling through Archive-It made it possible to preserve the final changes to these websites before they were taken offline.

Apply to be part of the Internet Archive K-12 program, and your school can help to capture and archive today’s primary source materials on the Web. 

A growing number of individuals and institutions recognize the importance of archiving and preserving the often transitory digital cultural artifacts that are distributed over the Web. But so far, the vast majority of decisions about what Web sites will live into the future have been made by adults, and reflect adults’ sensibilities about what constitutes the important records of history. We want and need to hear from students. 

The Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and California Digital Library collaborated on a pilot in the spring of 2008 and a full-year program for the 2008/2009 school year, working with a total of 10 elementary, middle and high schools. We are looking to expand this program to new schools in the coming year. You can explore the collections created during the 2008/2009 school year on the Archive-It website at: http://www.archive-it.org/k12/. 

Find a complete project description and the brief application here: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/newsevents/news/  Apply by August 14 for full consideration.

We are excited to be able to provide these and other preservation options to Archive-It partners as we increase the interoperability of the Archive-It service.  If you are interested in learning more, please contact the Archive-It team. More information about the LOCKSS system can be found at www.lockss.org

For the 2008/2009 school year, Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and California Digital Library collaborated on a program that explores archiving the Web from the perspective of students in elementary, middle and high school.

Using the Archive-It service, students from ten different schools selected born digital content from the Web to create “time capsules” to represent their world. By allowing students to identify sites that will be preserved for the long-term, the program gives teens and younger students a chance to identify and document their cultural history and the world that’s important to them. Unlike time capsules of tangible objects, which usually remain hidden for decades or centuries, the resulting Web collections are immediately visible and publicly accessible on the Archive-it website, with full text search for study and analysis.

For the 2009/2010 school year we hope to broaden the program’s outreach to additional schools around the country. To get involved and/or learn more, please send us your information through this request form. Applications will be available mid to late July.