Citing sources: Citing Internet Archive, Wayback Machine

Understanding and Citing Archival Materials

Resources Used

Video: Internet Archive Wayback Machine Introduction and Citation Guidance (7 mins)

Using the MLA Citation Template to Help Guide Us

While citing material from other archives can be challenging, the Internet Archive and Wayback machine is typically a little less complicated.

We can use the MLA template for creating citations to help us out. 

Visit the link below to see the example archived material, and then instructions for how to parse the material to make a citation for it.

MLA Template

The MLA (Modern Language Association) has provided us with a useful template to help us build citations on our own. It's important to be able to do this so that we can quickly make our own citations where no citation generator is available, and to recognize mistakes that citations generators make so that we can fix them before turning our work in.

Please find the MLA citation template linked under the Resources box.

Essentials of the MLA template:

1. Author (this could be a person or an organization - if there is no specific organization or person, start with the source title)
2. Source (this is usually the title of the material you are accessing whether article, webpage, film title, book, or book chapter, for example)
3. Container 1 (this is the larger thing that holds, or contains, the source, such as the name of the newspaper, the website, the platform, the book.)
4. Publication Date (in the case of Internet Archive, use the date that the source was captured (see video)
5. Container 2 (this is often used when the source and container is held within a larger repository, a database or, in this case, the archive that holds it.)
6. Date retrieved (this is usually only used for digitial sources, particularly those with no author, no date, and/or is likely to be updated frequently - for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine it is helpful to let your reader know when you accessed this specific capture)
7. Location (for anything that has page numbers, this would be the page(s) the source can be found on; for online materials this is often a URL, or other digital finder (see the APA citation guide for information about DOIs) - for the Internet Archive use the URL that the captured source is held at.

MLA citation for the source linked above:

APA citation for the source linked above:

We can use what we know about APA, to apply to our use of the MLA format:

1. Author - The Institute
2. Date - the captured date of the webpage you are using
3. Source - The title of the webpage.
4. Container 1 - The Institute
5. Container 2 - The Internet Archive Wayback Machine
6. Retrieved date and from location - see citation