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Memento Project

American web preservation project

Summary

American web preservation project

Memento was a project of the United States National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It was funded with the aim of making Web-archived content more easily discoverable and accessible to the public. The project concluded on 5 September 2025.

Technical description

Memento is defined in RFC 7089 as an implementation of the time dimension of content negotiation. HTTP accomplishes negotiation of content via a variety of headers that allow clients and servers to find content that the user desires.

Request Header	Response Header	Dimension	Examples	Reference
Accept	Content-Type	content-type of the representation	text/html	RFC 7231
Accept-Language	Content-Language	language of the representation	en	RFC 7231
Accept-Encoding	Content-Encoding	medium, typically compression, that the content has been encoded with	compress	RFC 7231
Accept-Charset	Content -Type	the character set used by the web page	iso-8859-5	RFC.
Accept-Datetime	Memento-Datetime	time of the representation	Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:43:03	RFC 7089

The header provided by HTTP does not necessarily reflect when a particular version of a web page came into existence. Also, the header may not exist in some cases. To provide more information, the header has been introduced to indicate when a specific representation of a web page was observed on the web.

This diagram shows how Memento uses a TimeGate (URI-G) to find the best archived page (URI-M) for a user, given the original resource (URI-R) and a datetime.

Usage

Copies of page can be found by simply navigating, in a web browser, to a link formatted, replacing urltoarchive with the full URL of the page desired.

JSON description of a Memento:

http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/api/json/YYYY/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/api/json/YYYYMM/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/api/json/YYYYMMDD/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/api/json/YYYYMMDDHH/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/api/json/YYYYMMDDHHMM/*urltoarchive* Or redirect to a Memento with a datetime that is close to a desired datetime:
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/YYYY/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/YYYYMM/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/YYYYMMDD/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/YYYYMMDDHH/*urltoarchive*
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/memento/YYYYMMDDHHMM/*urltoarchive*

References

Taylor, Nicholas. (2025-08-07). "Memento TimeTravel sunset".
"timetravel.mementoweb.org".
RFC 7089: HTTP Framework for Time-Based Access to Resource States -- Memento
Berners Lee, Tim. "Web Architecture: Generic Resources". World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 1996. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Generic {{Webarchive. link. (2015-06-02)
RFC 7231: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content
RFC 7232: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests
Nelson, Michael L. "2010-11-05: Memento-Datetime is not Last-Modified". Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group. November 5, 2010. http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2010/11/2010-11-05-memento-datetime-is-not-last.html {{Webarchive. link. (2015-05-19)
"Time Travel APIs".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

web-archiving web-archiving-initiatives los-alamos-national-laboratory old-dominion-university

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