Memento Project

Memento is a United States National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)–funded project aimed at making Web-archived content more readily discoverable and accessible to the public.

Memento is defined in RFC 7089[1] as an implementation of the time dimension of content negotiation.

[2] HTTP accomplishes negotiation of content via a variety of headers that allow clients and servers to find content that the user desires.

The Last-Modified header provided by HTTP[4] does not necessarily reflect when a particular version of a web page came into existence.

[5] Copies of page can be found by simply navigating, in a web browser, to a link formatted, replacing urltoarchive with the full URL of the page desired:[6] JSON description of a Memento: redirect to a Memento with a datetime that is close to a desired datetime:

The Memento logo
This diagram shows how Memento uses a TimeGate (URI-G) to find the best archived page (URI-M) for a user, given the original resource (URI-R) and a datetime.
This diagram shows how Memento uses a TimeGate (URI-G) to find the best archived page (URI-M) for a user, given the original resource (URI-R) and a datetime.