Searching the NCSU Libraries Collection

The websites that we have targeted and crawled by NCSU Libraries can be found at https://archive-it.org/home/ncsu-libraries. This page will show you a list of our collections, as well as each URL that we have targeted for crawling. There are two primary ways to search our collections page.

Searching by Search Term.

The search box on our Archive-It page allows you to enter URLs or individual search terms. It works best with full URLs as individual search terms are likely to appear on too many websites to be relevant. The Archive-It service currently only indexes the home page of each capture of each seed URL meaning search terms that would be deep within any given site are somewhat unlikely to be found. The following tips may help with your search.

• When attempting to find an individual URL in our collection, paste the entire URL into the search box at https://archive-it.org/home/ncsu-libraries

• Once results are returned clicking on the URL link in the search results will take you to the search results landing page. This page shows the date of every crawl of that URL. Dates with an asterisk next to them show that new data was collected with that crawl. Clicking on the date of the crawl will take you to the captured website from that crawl.

Searching by URL

• You can search by URL by entering the full URL of the website you hope to find in the general search bar on the main NCSU libraries Archive-It landing page. Using this search will likely return a large list of results (particularly within the NC State University Websites Collection) as nearly every URL includes NCSU somewhere in it.

• Searching from the URL Bar is perhaps the easiest way to search for websites that we have collected. You can enter the URL directly by using the following format for the URL: https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-972/*/FULL_URL_TO_Find For example pasting this url directly into your browser https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-972/*/https://ncsu.edu allows you to find each capture of the main NCSU website. You would replace https://ncsu.edu with any full URL that you wished to see if we had captured.

Searching the General Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive allows anyone to search for any URL to see if it has been captured by the Internet Archive. The primary difference between this search box and our NCSU Libraries specific collection search box is that the public wayback requires a full URL for a search to work, it does not accept search terms.

• Once you have put a URL into the search bar you will be taken to the landing page for that URL where it shows each date the URL was crawled and captured. Similar to the results you would get in our collection, clicking on a date will take you to the individual capture of the site.

• Searching from the URL Bar is perhaps the easiest way to search for websites that we have collected. You can enter the URL directly by using the following format for the URL - http://web.archive.org/web///FULL_URL_TO_Find. For example pasting this url directly into your browser http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://ncsu.edu allows you to find each capture of the main NCSU website. You would replace https://ncsu.edu with any full URL that you wished to see if we had captured.