WebCite
| Website | |
|---|---|
| Name: | WebCite® |
| Owner/Maintainer: | Gunther Eysenbach |
| Dates: | 1997 |
| Type: | storage |
| Fandom: | The Internet |
| URL: | http://www.webcitation.org/ |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
WebCite® was an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects) and is a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors. It was one of the first services to offer on-demand archiving of pages, a feature later adopted by many other archiving services, such as archive.today and the Wayback Machine.
Sometime between 9 and 17 July 2019, WebCite stopped accepting new archiving requests.[1] As of February 2021, it does not accept new archiving requests, but continued to serve existing archives. As of 19 August 2021, there was a maintenance announcement, and no archived content was accessible; WebCite came back online sometime between then and 8 October 2021. As of 29 October 2021, archived content is no longer available, but the website home page still works. It does not do web page crawling. With these changes, leading many archivists to migrate to the already this too sites.
History
According to Wikipedia, WebCite was conceived in 1997 by Gunther Eysenbach, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages.[2] In the next year, a pilot service was set up at the address webcite.net. Although it seemed that the need for WebCite decreased when Google's short term copies of web pages began to be offered by Google Cache and the Internet Archive expanded their crawling (which started in 1996),[3] By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite.[4]
WebCite used to be, but is no longer, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.[5] In a 2012 message on Twitter, Eysenbach commented that "WebCite has no funding, and IIPC charges €4000 per year in annual membership fees."[6]
WebCite "feeds its content" to other digital preservation projects, including the Internet Archive.[5] Lawrence Lessig, an American academic who writes extensively on copyright and technology, used WebCite in his amicus brief in the Supreme Court of the United States case of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.[7]
References
- ^ "WebCite 17th July 2019". 2019-07-17. Archived from the original on July 17, 2019. Retrieved 2021-01-17.
- ^ Eysenbach, Gunther; Diepgen, Thomas L. (November 28, 1998). "Towards quality management of medical information on the internet: evaluation, labelling, and filtering of information". The BMJ. 317 (7171): 1496–1502.
- ^ "Fixing Broken Links on the Internet". 2013-10-25. Archived from the original on 2022-06-27.
- ^ Eysenbach, Gunther; Trudel, Mathieu (2005). "Going, Going, Still There: Using the WebCite Service to Permanently Archive Cited Web Pages". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 7 (5): e60.
- ^ a b "WebCite Consortium FAQ". Archived from the original on 2022-06-19.
- ^ "Twitter post". June 11, 2012. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05.[dead link]
- ^ Cohen, Norm (January 29, 2007). "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2022-05-25.