The archive has must made a 2TB collection of past websites browsable. Give it
a try and please send any comments you have to this list or straight to the
Internet Archive.

I am hoping this points towards one of the "big ideas" in defining library
services in the digital age.

-brewster




Internet Library Enables Users to Surf the Web’s Past
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Group adds dimension of time to the Internet by developing a collection of
Election 2000 Web sites

San Francisco (June 18, 2001) Alexa Internet today announced the Election 2000
Collection, a groundbreaking, large-scale collection of date-searchable Web
sites archived and made available online.

The Election 2000 Collection developed for the U.S. Library of Congress by the
Internet Archive, and Compaq Computer, is now being made available as an
Internet library containing archived copies of more than 1000 election-related
Web sites (http://archive.alexa.com). The collection, searchable by date, by
website, and by category via Alexa’s new Wayback Machine technology, contains
more than two million megabytes, or about 87 million pages, of election-related
information gathered between August 1, 2000 and January 14, 2001, including what
was published on the candidates’ web sites, political party sites, and major
news sites.

The Election 2000 Collection is important because it contributes to the
historical record of the U.S. Presidential Election, capturing information that
could otherwise have been lost. With the growing role of the Web as an
influential medium in our culture, records of historical events such as the U.S.
Presidential election could be considered incomplete without materials that were
“born digital” and never printed on paper. Internet content changes at a very
rapid pace, especially during events such as elections, and indeed many
important election sites have already disappeared from the Web. With the
Election 2000 Collection, rapidly changing sites were archived daily or even
twice and three times in a day in an attempt to capture the dynamic nature of
Internet content.

Florian Baur, a graduate student at University Passau in Germany, is using the
Election 2000 Collection to research a thesis about the Internet’s role during
the recent presidential election. As an early user, he found that, “A thorough
analysis would have been virtually impossible without the collection. … the
collection is a great tool for anybody interested in the political use of the
Web. Due to the short-lived nature of the medium, institutions like the Internet
Archive provide an almost indispensable service for the scientific community.”

Compaq Computer undertook the major task of collecting and archiving sites for
the collection. "Compaq Research was able to deep crawl hundreds of Web sites
each day to build an unprecedented record of the changing nature of the web. It
was tricky because finding all the images, videos, and computer scripts
associated with each page required developing specialized technology," said
Brewster Kahle, president of Alexa Internet.

Alexa Internet created the Wayback Machine technology that allows users to
browse this huge collection and other Internet Libraries like it. “By enabling
users to retrieve Web sites out of the past, Alexa’s Wayback Machine technology
adds a time dimension to the Internet and creates the first
‘time browser’ for
the Web,” said Kahle.
About Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, the Web Information Company, gathers, stores, indexes and makes
available multi-terabyte digital libraries, collections of Web sites and other
Internet information. The company's Archive of the Web has been growing since
1996, and now contains over 40 terabytes of data. Alexa also offers a free Web
navigation service (available at www.alexa.com) which gives Internet users
access to the Archive as they surf, as well as detailed information about Web
sites such as related links, contact information, site statistics, and reviews.
The company donates a copy of its Archive of the Web on an ongoing basis to the
non-profit Internet Archive, which is endowed to preserve our digital heritage
for scholarly access. Alexa, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, is located
on the Web at http://www.alexa.com.