LTI’s Complete Toolkit for Preserving and Restoring Web Pages

Web pages are disappearing. Here's how to save them.

Posted on March 5, 2025 in Blog Posts

A little peek behind the editorial curtain: At LibTech Insights, we don’t let numbers and metrics determine what we publish or the topics we seek to cover. Intuition, curiosity, and intrigue often lead in more interesting directions. But over the past month, we have noticed a huge spike in interest in our back catalog of posts on digital and web preservation, likely due to the removal of many web pages from the US federal government’s website. With executive orders shaping discourse and priorities at universities, similar changes will almost certainly filter down to the institutional level. Digital preservation offers a toolkit for tracking these changes and retaining information that might otherwise be lost.

For that reason, we thought we’d create a round-up post for the tools and methods we’ve covered on ✨LibTech Tools✨ for preserving and restoring web pages.

---

Archive an Entire Web Page with SingleFile

A lesser-known but highly effective tool for web page preservation is SingleFile. What distinguishes SingleFile from other options is that it allows users to make an HTML copy of a web page and annotate it, making it perfect for research projects.

Web Archiving Made Easy: Saving a Website Snapshot with Zotero

Zotero is a free citation manager that many (including yours truly!) use for research projects. Less known is that it allows users to create “snapshots” of web pages. This video offers a quick tutorial on using this feature to preserve specific versions of web pages.

---

🔥 Stay up-to-date with LibTech Insights by signing up for our free newsletter. Just one weekly email with our new blog posts, top tech news stories, and other bonus content. Check out some posts from our archive:

• What the TikTok Ban Reveals about Librarianship and Digital Preservation
• Beyond the Job Title: Digital Preservation Librarian
• Preserving Podcasts in Institutional Repositories

🦋 Choice is now on Bluesky. Say hi to us over there!

---

Documenting the Web: Saving Pages with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

Many are aware of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which preserves different versions of web pages throughout time. But how do you actually use it for yourself? The first of this two-part series provides a quick tutorial. Don’t worry—it’s easy.

Documenting the Web: Restoring Web Pages with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

The second part of our series on Internet Archive covers the flip side of digital preservation: restoration. How can you recover web pages that have changed or disappeared? Thankfully, it’s easy.

Of course, if you like these videos, hit that subscribe button on YouTube.

Related Posts