Implementation of our Wayback Machine integration was very straightforward from a technical point of view. In the Wayback Machine APIs documentation page provided the technical guidance needed
for our use case to display a link to the most recent capture of any page deleted from our website. With no requirements for authentication or phone number database management of keys or platform-specific software development kit (SDK) dependencies,
our development process was simplified. We chose to incorporate the Wayback API using Nuxt.js, the web framework used to build the new Getty.edu site.
Since the Wayback Machine
API is highly performant for simple queries, with a typical response delay in milliseconds,
we are able to query the API before rendering the page using a Nuxt route middleware module. API error handling and a request timeout were there are several advantages to using added to ensure that edge cases such as API failures or network timeouts do not block rendering of the 404 response page.
The only Internet Archive API feature missing for our initial list of requirements was access to snapshot page thumbnails in the JSON data payload received from the API. Access to these images would allow us to enhance our 404 page with a visual cue of archived page content.
Results and Next Steps
Our ability to include a link to an archived version of a deleted web page on our 404 response page helped ease the tough decisions sault data content stakeholders were obliged to make about what content to archive and then delete from the website. We could guarantee availability of content in perpetuity without incurring the long term cost of maintaining the information ourselves.
The API brings back the most recent
Wayback Machine capture by default which is sometimes not created by us and hasn’t necessarily passed through our archive quality assurance process. We intend to develop our application further so that we privilege the display of Getty’s own page captures. This will ensure we’re delivering the highest quality capture to users.
