On this day of looking forward with hope and anticipation to what the new year will bring it might also be wise to take a look back to the past and see where we have come from. While not necessarily a news item, I thought it would be helpful to point out a site that has been very helpful to me. The Internet Archive is a site dedicated to “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, [they] provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.” The highlight of the site is the “Wayback Machine,” affectionately named after the WABAC machine used by our animated, time-traveling friends Sherman and Peabody.

By entering the URL of a favorite site into the Wayback Machine you can find previous versions of that site from prior Internet history (stretching all the way back to the ancient year of 1996). For fun, try looking up big landmark sites such as Disney.com or Yahoo! and see how archaic they used to look compared to their present-day versions. It is likely that, as time goes on, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine will become increasingly important as a research tool.