WebCite facts for kids
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| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Owner | University of Toronto |
| Created by | Gunther Eysenbach |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 1997 |
| Current status | View historical archives only, no new archives |
WebCite was a special online service that helped save important information from the internet. Think of it like taking a photo of a webpage at a certain time. This was super helpful for scientists, students, and writers.
When someone used WebCite, it would make a copy of a webpage exactly as it looked when they cited it. This meant that even if the original page changed or disappeared later, the saved copy would still be there. This solved a problem called "link rot," where links stop working because the pages are gone.
WebCite doesn't save new pages anymore. But you can still look at all the old pages it saved!
Contents
What WebCite Could Save
WebCite was able to save many different kinds of web content. This included regular web pages made with HTML. It could also save PDF files, which are like digital documents.
It even saved things like style sheets and JavaScript. These are the codes that make websites look good and work interactively. WebCite also saved digital images from the pages.
Besides the content, it saved "metadata." This is information about the saved page. It included when the page was saved and what type of file it was.
How WebCite Worked
WebCite was a non-profit group. This means it wasn't trying to make money. It was supported by publishers and editors. Anyone could use it for free.
It was one of the first services to let people save pages "on-demand." This means you could tell it exactly which page to save, right when you needed it. Other services like the Wayback Machine usually just crawl the internet automatically. WebCite was different because users chose what to save.
WebCite's History
A person named Gunther Eysenbach first thought of WebCite in 1997. He talked about it publicly in 1998. He thought such a service could even show how often web pages were cited.
A test version of WebCite started in 1999. Even though other services like Google Cache and the Internet Archive also saved web pages, WebCite was special. It was the only one that let users choose exactly when to save a page.
WebCite also helped scholarly journals. It let them automatically save the links they cited in their articles. By 2008, over 200 journals were using WebCite regularly.
WebCite used to be part of a group called the International Internet Preservation Consortium. However, WebCite didn't have enough money to pay the yearly fees. So, it left the group.
WebCite also shared its saved content with other projects. One of these was the Internet Archive. A famous American academic, Lawrence Lessig, even used WebCite in a legal case. He used it to show evidence in a case at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Between July 9 and 17, 2019, WebCite stopped taking new requests to save pages. For a while, between late 2021 and mid-2023, you couldn't even see the old saved pages. Only the main website worked.
How WebCite Was Funded
WebCite tried to raise money in 2013. They needed about $22,500 to keep the service running. This money would help them move their service to a new online system.
WebCite did not charge individuals, editors, or publishers to use its service. It earned money from publishers who wanted their publications analyzed. The University of Toronto also helped support it early on.
Copyright and WebCite
WebCite believed that saving web pages was allowed by copyright laws. They used ideas like "fair use" and "implied license" to explain this.
"Fair use" means you can use copyrighted material in certain ways without permission. WebCite argued that its saved copies were for academic research. They didn't harm the original work's value.
"Implied license" means that if a website doesn't say "do not save," it gives permission to services like WebCite to save its content. WebCite would not save pages if a website used special codes to say "no archiving."
A court case in 2006, Field v. Google, supported this idea. The court agreed that Google's saving of web pages was allowed by fair use and implied license.
DMCA Requests
If a copyright owner asked WebCite to remove a saved page, WebCite would do so. This is called a DMCA request. The pages were moved to a "dark archive." This meant they were not publicly available. However, in legal cases, people could pay to access these hidden copies.
See also
- Archive.today
- Perma.cc
- Wayback Machine
