Dead or Broken Link? The Wayback Machine Can Help

Have you ever come across a link for something interesting and been disappointed because the document is not found when you click on it? We at C|M|Law Library have had this happen several times of late working with patrons—one time a student was trying to cite check a law review article and another a patron was looking for a document cited in the Federal Register.

Websites change often and sometimes in the process of changing they may no longer have the information that the website once displayed. Link rot is a term sometimes used to apply to these situations where hyperlinks point to web pages, servers, or other resources that have become permanently unavailable. In these cases, The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine may be able to help. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “universal access to all knowledge.” The Internet Archive has numerous books (visual and audio), music, documentaries, and music among other things, including the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. Simply paste your URL into the Wayback Machine and it will reveal its content as it existed on certain days in the past.