The Archive-It service is excited to announce that it now natively supports the Memento protocol. Memento aims to make it as straightforward as possible to access the web of the past as it is to access the current web. The Memento protocol has been dubbed “time travel for the web” and is a framework to integrate the live and the archived web with easy to use tools. The integration of Memento will provide additional exposure and discovery options for publicly available Archive-It collections.
Memento is a research effort between LANL, ODU, Internet Archive and others originally funded by Library of Congress, and you can read more about this project on the ODU blog, and on the Memento website.
From Michael L. Nelson, professor of Computer Science at Old Dominion University:
“Memento is a set of HTTP extensions to aid in the discovery and navigation of archived web content. Archive-It content was previously discoverable from the LANL Memento Aggregator, but it was available via a proxy service. Now that Archive-It has native Memento support, discovery will be faster and fully functional. In particular, the complete set of Memento HTTP response headers will make it easier for Memento-aware applications, such as MementoFox and the British Libary’s Mementoservice, to fully integrate and navigate Archive-It’s collections. Applications that are not yet Memento-aware will continue to function as before. Native Memento support will also make it easier to build custom applications in the future, a subject of ongoing research by many research teams”
