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Human Rights in Africa

Introduction to resources and researching human rights within an African context. Resources highlighted include open access materials as well as those only available to the BU community.

What is the Wayback Machine?

Broken links are a regular frustration when researching Africa on the internet.

This is especially true for controversial topics such as those you might encounter researching human rights.
Reasons they disappear?  Censorship. Lack of funding. 

​There IS a tool that can help:

                                                               

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has crawled and archived over 310 billion websites. You can search for broken links and view the instances in which they were archived. Just paste the broken URL into the WayBack Machine's search box.

 If the site was crawled and archived, your results will indicate when this happened. You can click on each archival copy. Depending on when the site went inactive, you may need to go back several years to retrieve the information you are looking for. 

Example Retrieving a Website

For example: You want to access the site: Afronet Online - The Inter-African Network for Human Rights and Development. 
 Problem? The site is not longer active: http://www.oneworld.org/afronet/afronet.htm  


                                              

 

A possible solution? Go to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/
Paste the URL into WayBack Machine:

                               

 

It turns out that this URL has been archived 51 times between March 7, 2000 and March 27, 2017 : 

 

Click back through the archives until you find the page as it was:

 

Note: Not ALL websites are accessible in this way, or accessible down to the article level, but it is certainly worth a try.

Examples of Web Archive Collections

Head, African Studies Library

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Beth Restrick
Contact:
African Studies Library
6th floor, Mugar Memorial Library

Mon-Fri, 9am- 5pm
617-353-3726
Subjects: African Studies