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FAQ
What is Archive Montana?
Archive Montana is a fully text searchable online archive of web sites made available by the Montana State Library. The domain of Archive Montana is Montana government and non-profit web sites. The archive enables Montana to preserve a new heritage, its government and non-profit web sites, for permanent public access.
What is the historical coverage of Archive Montana?
Archive Montana began controlled preservation of the state government web on July 1, 2007. The archive is updated every 90 days for a selected set of domains. In addition, Archive Montana includes archives preserved less comprehensively by the Internet Archive since 1996.
How can I tell when a web page was archived?
Archived web pages are now headed by a light yellow banner that includes the date archived. Also, the URL of each archived web page contains the date archived. For example, the URL below was captured January 12, 2007 at 22:31:57 GMT:
http://wayback.archive-it.org/416/20070112223157/...etc.
The date and time within the URL is in this format: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
How do I know if I’m in the web archive or the live web?
Be aware that there are situations in which following a link in the web archive will take you to the live web. For example, if an archived page has a link to a page outside the archive, the link will take you to the live web. Live web pages look like the usual live web pages. Archived pages are headed by a notice in a light yellow background telling you that the page is archived. Also, the URL of an archived page will contains the address for the WayBack Machine, like http://wayback.archive-it.org.
How do I search Archive Montana?
Use the search boxes on the Archive Montana web pages (except the FAQ page). Search by names, topics, key words or phrases of interest. Archived web sites are indexed full-text by the search engine, Nutch 
.
What three kinds of information are available by searching Archive Montana?
- Specific documents, like .PDF's
- Lists of links to documents and web pages.
- Lists of dated crawls as shown here. An asterisk by a date in the browse list denotes content changes when compared to the previous crawl.
Can I search by URL?
Yes, in the Archive Montana search field, enter url: and then the domain of the URL. For example, to search the Montana state government URL, which is http://mt.gov/ enter:
url:mt.gov.
What is an Archive Montana crawl and what is the WayBack Machine?
Our contracted partner, Archive-It , sends its Heritrix spider to crawl a specified list of Montana state government domains. Crawls are made on a schedule specified by the Montana State Library. The crawls are stored and made accessible by full-text search in the Archive-It WayBack Machine .
Who is the Internet Archive?
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit, digital library founded in 1996. The Internet Archive crawls the web opportunistically and makes web archives available in it's WayBack Machine. The Internet Archive also provides a higher level of service via Archive-It. This service includes full-text search and controlled crawls. The Montana State Library partnered with Archive-It to provide Archive Montana beginning July 1, 2007.
Does Archive Montana have limitations?
Content of Archive Montana includes all web sites, documents, images and other files available online when a domain is crawled. However, current web crawling technology has limits. The web archive does not include pages generated from web-enabled databases that require user input. Also, note Archive Montana cannot always render information written in JavaScript. In these cases, patrons are redirected to the live web.
Why are there two domains archived for many state agencies?
The state government web site used three domain names during the period archived by Archive Montana. These domains are discoveringmontana.com, state.mt.us, and mt.gov. Discoveringmontana.com appears to duplicate the other two domains. Archived web pages of discoveringmontana.com crawls can be found in the general Internet Archive WayBack Machine . Mt.gov and state.mt.us archives are found by searching Archive Montana. Also, mt.gov and state.mt.us were predominant at different times in the history of the Montana state government web, so we have linked both in the state agencies collection.
