Documenting your web sources presents a problem. You can capture the URL of the web page where you get the information, but what happens when the owner of that website removes that page?

“Boss, these obituaries are from five years ago. Can we just delete them now?”

“Sure, what else are we gonna do, save them for posterity?”

Obituaries consist of copyright text, which you cannot legally copy onto your own website.

The solution is to archive the target web page. Then include links to the archived pages when you link to the original page. Always include a link to the original page, to be fair to the owner of that site, until that page is removed.

By far the largest and most popular internet archive site is archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine. You can make sure a page is already on there, simply by searching for it. If it is not there, you will be invited to have it saved to the Wayback Machine. The direct link is web.archive.org/save.

Another popular archive site is archive.ph.

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