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It turns out that this URL has been archived 51 times between March 7, 2000 and March 27, 2017 :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
- Current Events in Africa Web Archive (CEAWA)Collected by: Africana Librarians Council
Archived since: Mar, 2014
Description: A collaborative project led and funded by the Africana Librarians Council’s Title VI Librarians, this is a project dedicated to archiving websites which document current events in African countries. The goal of this project is a plan to create permanent archive copies of content-rich websites that are valuable to scholars and students interested in studying and analyzing African events as they unfold.
Subject: Politics & Elections, Spontaneous Events, Society & Culture
Creator: Marion Frank-Wilson, Karen Fung, Timothy Johnson, Lauris Olson, Jason Schultz, Mohamed el Seoud - North Africa & the Middle East 2011-2013Collected by: Internet Archive Global Events
Archived since: Jan, 2011
Description: This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and other countries. Countries separated by site groups (scroll down the page to see all of them). Archived content is in Arabic, English, and French.
Subject: Spontaneous Events, Government, Blogs & Social Media, North Africa, Middle East, blogs, social media
Creator: Archive-It
Publisher: Archive-It
Coverage: North Africa, Middle East, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Sudan
Date: 2011
Rights: CC
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