LSE’s homepage looked very different in 1996, discovers LSE Library’s Daniel Payne. Find out what it looked like and read Daniel’s tips for exploring historic websites.
This archived homepage provides an insight into life at LSE in 1996, when you could find out about the newly appointed Director Anthony Giddens, buy a soup on campus for 85p, and study the LLB where three B’s at A-level were required. You can explore snapshots of LSE webpages from 1996 to the present day at the UK Web Archive.
How to locate historic websites
- Browse the open access UK Web Archive to see how sites have changed since 2004.
- Use the Memento service to find snapshots of websites over time and find out where they are archived.
- Search the special collections of websites archived during and after a particular event, such as general elections.
- From April 2013, the legal requirement for every UK print publication to be deposited with the British Library was extended to electronic material. You may be able to consult UK websites since 2013 at the British Library’s reading rooms in St. Pancras.
- The National Archives preserves UK Government web material on its archive, such as Twitter feeds, videos and websites.
- If you’re trying to access any website and you’re getting an error, see if there is an older cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://example.com/(replace “http://example.com” with the website you are trying to access).
Contributed by Daniel Payne (Curator for Politics and International Relations, LSE Library). This post originally appeared on the LSE Library blog.
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