Web History

This section contains references to resources, tools, and institutions that might be of interest for scholars studying the history of the web.

Available Archives

• The most comprehensive archive of the web ranging back to 1996 is provided by the Internet Archive. Historical web resources are available via the Wayback Machine.

  • For a short introduction see this tutorial by the Digital Methods Initiative.
  • A number of tools exist for researching the Internet Archive’s web archive. See the Tools section below.

• Besides the Internet Archive a number of other web archives are publicly available. This GitHub webrecorder/public-web-archives aims at provinding an overview of existing public web archives. Another resource is the List of Web archiving initiatives.

Usenet

• Usenet Newsgroups are available on:
  • Google Groups with an easy web interface
  • Usenet Historical Collection as mbox mailbox files
• FAQs were commonly written and circulated to describe the topics of specific newsgroups. They can be found in the above mentioned archives. Another source is the mirror of the rtfm.mit.edu ftp server.

Self-Archiving

• Webrecorder.io provides a platform as well as stand alone software archiving webpages. Instructions on using the Webrecorder can be found on the tools help page as well as in the video tutorials published in Webrecorder’s YouTube channel.

Tools

• Wayback Machine:
  • The Wayback Machine itself is a great starting point for accessing historic web resources and doing historic research with and of the web.
  • The Digital Methods Initiative provides two research tools: Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Ripper (Tutorial) and the Wayback Network per Year.
  • Archives Unleashed Toolkit
• oldweb.today
• The International Internet Preservation Consortium maintains a website with an extensive list of tools and software for creating and interacting with web archives. The tools listed are not just aimed at researchers, but archivists as well.
• Netlab provides a list of tools and tutorials aimed mainly at researcher.
• List of web archiving tools maintained by Virginia Tech Library.

Projects

• One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (Tumblr page of the project.) is dedicated to the history of GeoCities, a free web and formerly popular hosting service founded in 1994(?) and shut down in 2009. For information on the project [1], [2].