The Memento Project

The Memento Project 

The Memento Project

About Guide Demos Tools

Have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to get to old versions of Web pages? Did you bookmark a page last year, and revisited it recently only to find that the current content isn't even remotely related to what caught your interest back then?

If so, the Memento project should be of interest to you because it advocates a rather straightforward approach to make navigating last year’s Web as easy as navigating today’s.

Remnants of the past Web are available, and there are many efforts ongoing to archive even more Web content. It’s just that the past Web is not as readily accessible as today’s. For example, if you want to see an archived version of http://cnn.com, you can go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and search for it there. Yes, you can find the CNN front page of 9/11 there. Or if you want to see an old version of the Wikipedia page about – say – Clocks, you can go to the current page and from there follow a link to one of the many prior versions. And, if you are interested in stories that featured on the BBC news site on your last year’s birthday, you can explore the archive that Matthew Somerville set up in his spare time.

But wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just connect to cnn.com, Wikipedia, or news.bbc.co.uk indicating that you are interested in the pages of March 20 2008, not the current ones? If you could activate a time machine in your browser or bot?

We definitely think it would be quite a feat, and we have some ideas on how to get there.

The Memento Project