The Wayback Machine allows users to browse billions of pages of archived websites. The primary difference between the general Wayback Machine web portal and Archive-It websites collected by institutions such as the Society (which are also viewed through the Wayback portal) is that Archive-It collections are full-text searchable. Society staff selects websites to preserve in various collections and can capture websites at strategic times, while the general Wayback Machine may or may not have an archived version of the website for which a user is searching. 

Several factors affect how often we crawl a website, such as how often the site is updated with new content, whether the site is used to communicate news, how long content remains on the site, the relationship of items on the website to holdings in the paper collections, and news events that affect the content of a site. Publications and some websites, such as state agencies and county government, are crawled on a scheduled frequency, while others are captured on an as-needed basis. Other times we try to capture a website before it is discontinued or redesigned. 

Enter a search term in the box to browse across all archived Society websites or browse by collection either from the Society Archive-It collection overview page or links to individual collections. Click on the URL for a website to see a calendar page with linked dates for all captures. An archived web page will display a yellow banner across the top with the capture date, the collection name, and the collecting institution. 

When a website changes its address, the old URL will usually redirect to the new URL, at least for a short period of time, if not longer. However, in order to be clear about the address of the website we harvested, we create another listing when a website changes its URL. Because of the redirect function, the later crawl dates may continue to display for the seed of the older URL. See the Description field for the related URLs. 

An asterisk indicates that the page was updated with new content. Capture dates without an asterisk indicate that the website has not changed since the previous capture. The banner in these instances may read, “Note that this document was downloaded, and not saved because it was a duplicate of a previously captured version.”

Generally, Archive-It does not archive the same data a second time if it has already captured that data. This feature helps conserve our data budget. 

Usually, this is due to a slight variation on the URL: e.g., www. in front of a URL or without it, or the presence or absence of an ending slash. There may be slight differences between two captures with the same date. 

Some archived videos may not play back on the page, however, users can still access the videos using the Videos link. At the banner at the top of the page (“You are viewing an archived web page ….”), click on the link (“Videos”) to access this content (click “Watch”).

As we review harvested websites to make sure that we captured the content we intended to archive, we are able to view missing URLs and run crawls to capture missed content. Consequently, the date on the Archive-It banner may reflect the date of this secondary capture. Alternatively, some linked sites would normally be out of scope for a particular site, but because those sites are also being harvested for the collection, may default to an earlier capture of that site, hence the earlier date.

It’s possible the content may not have been captured (in these instances, a “Not in Archive” screen will usually appear), but if you experience consistent difficulty viewing archived websites one troubleshooting approach is to try using another browser (for example, Firefox or Chrome).

Please note that some types of web content such as database driven content (or anything that requires user input) is not accessible on captured websites, nor are some functions enabled by some scripting languages such as JavaScript. Similarly, links to pages external to the main site will be considered out of scope and will not be archived.

Please include the Wayback URL, the date of capture, and the following credit: “Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society Web Archives”.

As with other records held by the Society's library and archives, the Society often does not hold the copyright for those materials. The responsibility for determining copyright and obtaining the appropriate permissions for use rests with the user, not the Society.

Please contact:

• County government sites: Eileen Snyder (eileen.snyder@wisconsinhistory.org)
• State government agency sites: Jacob Riehl (jacob.riehl@wisconsinhistory.org)
• Local government sites: Andrew Baraniak (andrew.baraniak@wisconsinhistory.org) 
• Online newsletters: (govarc@wisconsinhistory.org) 
• Organic and sustainable agriculture and other thematic websites: Jonathan nelson (jonathanr.nelson@wisconsinhistory.org)