The Internet Archive Wayback Machine

On October 24, 2001, the long‐awaited Wayback Machine was unveiled at the Bancroft Library of the University of California‐Berkeley. Its creator/sponsor, the Internet Archive, is a registered US non‐profit organization that was founded in 1996 to provide archival access to material available on the Internet. Its collections encompass Web pages, Usenet newsgroups, documents from Arpanet (the original Internet, a computer network created by the US Department of Defense in the mid‐1970s), and other digital material. As all librarians are familiar with the difficulty in preserving electronic material for generations to come, surely this is a most worthy effort.

The...