Everybody who has used the internet knows that sites often disappear. These may range from someone's favorite site, to simply a link you find to a
page that doesn't exist anymore. This also happens in a physical library, when items are misplaced or go completely missing. Libraries and the Internet are both highly complex organizations where things can go wrong.What can you do when you can't find something?
- In a library, you have little choice except to ask the librarians, who have a number of internal procedures to try to get the item for you.
- On the web, you must do this work yourself (although you can always ask a librarian for help!).
But what can you do? Here is an example.
You find this paper published on the web from Emory University:
The Architecture of Colonial Presence by Martina Millà Bernad, and in her bibliography, you find a reference to an article that interests you. There is a link, but the link no longer works. Buntrock, Dana (University of Illinois at Chicago). "Without Modernity: Japan's Challenging Modernization"
http://www.saed.kent.edu/Architronic/v5n3/v5n3.02.html What can you do?
- The item's address (URL) may have changed. Google and other search engines regularly clean out old addresses and update them with the current state of the web. Often the URL has merely changed (there are many reasons for this), and with a search for the item in Google using exact title (using quotation marks "") and author, you can normally find the item rather quickly. If this doesn't work however, continue with
- The item is listed in Google, but the link doesn't work from there, either. This should be a temporary situation because Google's web spiders will update their database in the future. During this period of time, you can try clicking on Cached.
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The Internet Archive. There is a lot of information in the Internet Archive, and one of their most important tasks since 1996 has been to archive the web in the Wayback Machine. As of this writing, they have over 85 billion pages archived.Please note that this is not a complete archive, however.
How to Use the Wayback Machine Copy the old address (in this case, http://www.saed.kent.edu/Architronic/v5n3/v5n3.02.html), paste it into the box, then click on
Take Me Back.
If the page was archived, you will see a list such as this, showing various stages of the page. From this point, you can click into the page and retrieve it and we discover that it was in a journal called "Architronic".
Further, from this article, you can navigate to the
main page of the entire journal, where we discover that this was a scholarly, refereed, electronic journal that apparently died in 1999. In this way, we can still retrieve the entire journal.
The Wayback Machine is a highly complex, automated site, and sometimes you will retrieve no results here as well. You may have to choose another date. Images often do not appear. The Wayback Machine is quite interesting in itself, since it has archived so many sites for such a long time and you can see how they have changed.
Here is the archive of the
U.S. government site for the White House, which goes back to the second term of the Clinton presidency, and here is the archive for
The American University of Rome. So now, if one of the sites in this exhibition disappears, you know how to go about finding it!