How Web Archives URLs Work

Owned by
Wiedeman, Gregory
Last updated: Apr 26, 2023
2 min read

UAlbany has been collecting all of albany.edu since 2012 and has also been capturing some New York political organizations since 2016.

https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-652/*/ + URL

View calendar page of all captures for a URL

Use the URL of the page you would like to check,

  1. Find the URL of the page you would like to check for previous captures, such as: https://www.albany.edu/covid-19

  2. Append this URL to: https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-652/*/

  3. Example:

    1. https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-652/*/https://www.albany.edu/covid-19

  4. This will display a calendar page with links that will "replay" how that URL existed during that time:



How Web Archives URLs Work

Web archives use special URLs called Mementos. These have a three part structure, with the UAlbany Web Archives root URL, then the timestamp of when the page was captured and preserved, and the original URL of the page. The timestamp can also be replaced by an asterisk (*) to view a calendar page that lists all available captures.

"Check Web Archives" as a Bookmark

You can create a bookmark to check if the page you are viewing is available in the UAlbany Web Archives. Create a new bookmark and replace the URL with:

javascript:(function(){location.href=location.href.replace(/.*?:\/\//,'https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-652/*/');}());

(Tested with Firefox and Chrome)