Web Archiving

How does the UTSA of today differ from the UTSA of the past? Researchers interested in UTSA's institutional legacy can look to the university's archived web resources to find out more about UTSA's past.

Much of what used to be recorded in print is now published online, so capturing web archives allows UTSA Special Collections to collect relevant materials we lack in our physical collections.

Typical primary sources available in archival collections include correspondence, journals, and scrapbooks. Online these primary sources take the forms of social media, blogs, or image hosting sites.

Each new government administration implements their own changes and in the case of web resources, this can mean overhauling or taking down sites. Without web archives, these changes might wind up lost to time.

To understand an institution's plan of action around specific topics, researchers must look at the institution's policies, procedures, and other documentary materials. These types of documents can be updated regularly, so web archives allow researchers to track the evolution of these documents over time.