Consultant reports and web pages as citable resourc es-- or not

[Eric Zurcher]

Hi,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Lammers [mailto:lammers at VAXA.CIS.UWOSH.EDU]
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 November 2002 12:50 AM
> To: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
> Subject: Re: [TAXACOM] Consultant reports and web pages as citable
> resources-- or not
>
>
> At 08:23 PM 11/10/02 -0700, Robin Leech wrote:
>
> >If citing web pages, then give the location, day and time of day for the
> >citing, as web pages change fairly often.
>
> I often see this done, but have often wondered if it's to any avail.  Is
it
> really possible to retrieve the appearance of a given page at a given
> time?  Can I write to a webmaster and ask to see what such-and-such an
> address looked like the evening of 26 July 1996???
>

Actually quite a lot of the "historical" Web is indeed archived and
retrievable, via the "Wayback Machine" at http://web.archive.org . But, as
usual, there are caveats. Not all web pages lend themselves to archiving via
the mechanism used by that site (for example, pages generated dynamically
from a database, or those otherwise restricting Web "crawlers"). And there's
no real guarantee that the "Wayback Machine" will always be there.

Eric Zurcher
CSIRO Livestock Industries
Canberra, Australia
Eric.Zurcher at csiro.au