The Internet is an ephemeral medium that makes it difficult to find earlier content that may no longer be current. News articles, for example, may or may not be retained or may not be organized for ease of access. Businesses and organizations may change names, cease to exist, or delete content from their websites, causing broken links and 404 ("Not Found") errors.
The same is also true for institutional websites, such as the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where non-print published information shared on University websites may seem to have disappeared. For example, to locate a list of faculty from ten years ago who worked in the Heilbrunn Department of Population & Family Health or to find a list of Columbia Department of Ophthalmology consultants in 2002, the current websites will not be useful.
The Internet Archive has long offered a solution to this problem with its WayBack Machine. Launched in 2001, the Wayback Machine has long allowed the public to search and access its saved websites. Beginning in 2006, Internet Archive began to offer a subscription web archiving service, Archive-It. Columbia University Libraries enrolled in this service beginning in 2010 and since that time has maintained a robust web archiving service of all pages included in Columbia University's domain (i.e., columbia.edu) and subdomains (e.g., cumc.columbia.edu); many Columbia University webpages created prior to 2010 are also available on the Wayback Machine because Internet Archive crawled these sites even prior to the University’s subscription.
It has become common practice to use the archived website from the Internet Archive as the citation source, as citing archived sites can help ensure these sources remain reliably available. Citation integration will continue to evolve with the popularity and growth of the Internet Archive.