[Apologies for the last, quotes-only, email - hit the wrong button]
On 10/07/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I agree that this would be useful, to the extent it's possible ("there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine"). Also, since IA can and will remove pages from the archive under certain circumstances (one of which is when a robots.txt file appears later), you still have to worry about an archive disappearing later.
Mmm. IA have made it reasonably clear that they're not there to compete with paid-for "real archives", if that makes sense - they're not going to be competing with the NYT for access to NYT backstories, which are our major need for links to transient pages. It *is* better than nothing - especially if we extend it to the national legal-deposit archives that will be slowly appearing - but I'm not sure if it'd be enough benefit to be worth the work.