Web Archives

Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) utilizes the Internet Archive's Archive-It service to capture and provide access to archived versions of old or outdated web pages, which fall under our unit’s collecting policy. From our Archive-It landing page, you can search for content by keyword or URL, if known. There is also an option that will allow you to search page text instead of site names.

Search the Iowa State University Web Archives.

Search Tips

It is not always possible to search for pages by date of content creation, unless this date appears somewhere in the site URL or the text of the page. This is sometimes the case. For example, articles from the Inside Iowa State newsletter for faculty and staff contain date of publication in the URL via a YYYY/MM/DD format. Other news-based resources, however, like the Iowa State Daily, do so inconsistently (e.g. in the pdf version but not the html) or not at all. More often, the date associated with an archived web document will be the date it was crawled. Therefore, it is typically more reliable to begin with keyword searches and adjust from there.

In addition to interactive page layouts, Archive-It sometimes also captures audiovisual content and can play video files. Embedded videos do not always appear where they normally would in the page layout, but you can still access them through the “Videos” link on the ribbon at the top of the page. This link will return search results for any and all individual video files that were captured for that page.

Unfortunately, Archive-It does not always capture search functions or embedded content with a lot of external data, such as Google calendars or maps. Sometimes, if you are looking for an events calendar, it’s sometimes a good idea to the check the paper document files for the relevant department or program.