Archived Websites

The National Library has a collection of Singapore websites of individuals, associations, businesses, cultural organisations, significant events and news. These websites are a valuable resource for researchers to study websites which may no longer exist or observe changes in specific websites over time. Together, these websites reflect various aspects of Singaporean life, culture, and heritage in the 21st century.

The library’s archived websites collection dates from 2006 and contains over 90,000 unique archived websites and webpages and more than 360,000 archived versions (snapshots of the same website over time). The collection includes all publicly available .sg websites which the library has a mandate to collect under the National Library Board Act since 2019, and a selection of non .sg websites that are owned by Singaporeans or Singapore organisations/institutions via permission seeking. The collection is accessible though the Web Archive Singapore (WAS) portal.

Due to copyright laws, the archived websites can only be accessed from a designated computer terminal on Level 11 of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, unless permission has been granted by website owners to provide online access. Archived websites that are currently available online includes government websites and websites with the permission from copyright owners.

For more information on WAS and nominating your website for archival, check out the videos below.

• Say Hello to Web Archive Singapore

• Archive Your Website with Web Archive Singapore

This guide will explain how to search, browse, and access the library’s archived websites collection on WAS.

Searching on Web Archive Singapore

WAS employs full-text search capabilities and will display search results that contain the keywords in the archived website’s title, content, documents, or images.

Recommended steps to search for an archived website

1. If you know the website URL that you are searching for, input the URL in the search bar, e.g. nlb.gov.sg. This search method will likely return the most accurate results.

   Alternatively, you can also use keywords. To search for a phrase, use quotation marks to generate better results, e.g. “National Library Board”.

   TIP: Use Boolean operators to expand or narrow your search. For example, 'National Day Parade OR NDP' will retrieve websites containing the words National Day Parade or NDP.

2. Refine your search results by using the Accessibility, Type, Year, and URL filters. The explanations are detailed below:

   Accessibility

   Online: To view archived content that are available online.

   Onsite: To view archived content that are only available at Level 11 of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library due to copyright restrictions. Archived websites that are only available onsite are denoted with a lock icon. Please approach the counter at Level 11 for assistance.

   

   Type

   Websites: To view archived websites only. This refers to website that have been archived in its entirety (i.e. homepage and all related webpages of that website). Selecting this filter will return the record where you can view all the archived versions of that website.

   Webpages: To view archived webpages only. This refers to specific webpage of a website, such as news articles and blog posts. Please note that other archived versions of the webpage may not be displayed in the record, and associated links in the webpage may not be archived.

   Documents: To view PDF or Word documents that were archived from the website.

   Images: To view images (e.g. in JPG, PNG, GIF formats) that were archived from the website.

   URL

   Use this filter to view archived content only from that URL.

3. Recommended filters for searching websites and webpage

If you are searching for an archived website, click here to see the recommended filters:

Accessibility: Online (if the archived website is available online)

Type: Websites

Year: Select the year of when the website was archived where necessary

URL: Select the website URL where necessary

In this example of searching for the National Library Board (NLB) website, we searched for the phrase “National Library Board” and applied the following filters as pictured below.

If you are searching for an archived webpage, click here to see the recommended filters:

Accessibility: Online (if the archived website is available online)

Type: Webpages

Year: Select the year of when the website was archived where necessary

URL: Select the website URL where necessary

In this example of searching for the BiblioAsia blog article on the Web Archive Singapore, we searched for the keywords ‘“web archive Singapore” BiblioAsia’ and applied the following filters as pictured below.

4. Where necessary, you can remove the applied filters by unchecking the filters on the left or clicking the grey boxes under the search bar.

Viewing the Archived Website

Click on the record title to view the archived website.

This is what the NLB website looked like on 28 Apr 2006. To view other archived versions of the NLB website, you can either select the dates shown in the timeline bar or ‘View Other Versions’ for the complete list of dates.

You can explore the archived website by clicking on the available links within the website.

Depending on the record that you are viewing, the links within the website may not load or you may see an error message. This may be due to several reasons:

1. The link is pointing to another website (different URL) and was not archived as it was outside our archiving scope.

2. If it is a large website, our crawler may have archived only a portion of the website and not its entirety due to time and data size constraints.

3. Only one page of the website has been selected for archiving, as only that webpage met our selection criteria for preservation.

4. Sometimes the display of the archived website will also lead to an error message if you click on certain links (e.g. dropdown menus). When you encounter such errors, we suggest that you explore the archived website via its sitemap if it is available.

Browsing Web Archive Singapore

You can also explore WAS through the Special Collections and Browse by Category.

Special Collections are themed archived websites curated by librarians on topics that are of interest to the public and researchers. Some themes include defunct schools, and past events like the 2015 Southeast Asian Games and ASEAN Para Games, the 2018 Trump-Kim Summit, National Day parades and the Singapore Budget.

You can also browse archived websites by categories such as Arts, Events, Heritage & Culture, etc., in the Browse by Category section. Each category has a search feature to allow you to narrow your results based on the archived website’s title and abstract.

Citations

The citation feature enables you to save a list of archived websites which you can revisit later and/or email the list to yourself.

Click on ‘Add to Citation’, found under each website record, to save it.

You can access your list of citations by clicking on “Citation” at the top of the page. Here you can make further edition to your citations list and email the list to yourself.

Please note that your citation list may be lost once you close your Internet Browser.

Copyright of archived websites

Copyright of the archived website remains with website owners. Please approach the website owner if you wish to reproduce any content.