University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: March 20, 2003

Internet Time Travel

It's 4 p.m. and your mocha latte is getting cold. Your paper for Women's History Month is due tomorrow. Lulled by the music in the Elmwood Avenue coffeehouse where you've spent the afternoon, you realize it's too late to return to campus to retrieve the books on women's history you located through the BISON Online Catalog http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/bison/. Yet, you plan to retrieve some of the full-text articles found in the Women's Studies databases available to UB students http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/cgi-test/title.cgi?sortby=subject&subject=Women's+Studies as soon as you can locate a free public printer in the area.

A quick overview of women's history is what you need, ASAP—only 17 hours until the paper's deadline. Timelines—that's the ticket! With your laptop, you utilize the signal from the wireless network in a nearby bank to check out some of the timelines from various Web directories http://dmoz.org/Society/History/Timelines and http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/History/Timelines. You locate some winners at AlternaTime http://www2.canisius.edu/~emeryg/time.html, where Canisius College librarian George Emery has assembled links to history, science, technology, arts, popular culture and science fiction timelines. The Suffrage Movement Timeline http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwtl.html, the Timeline of the Women's Rights Movement http://www.legacy98.org/timeline.html and the History of Women in Sports Timeline http://www.northnet.org/stlawrenceaauw/timeline.htm propel you through hundreds of years of history.

The coffeehouse manager strolls by on a break, chef hat in hand, and you assist him with his hotel-management research project (also due tomorrow) by visiting the Food Timeline http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/food.html and the Culinary History Timeline http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/food1.html. Unable to decide between the topics "corned beef" http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/foodfaq1.html#cornedbeef and "the history of vegetarianism" http://www.ivu.org/history/, his break time passes quickly and he hurries to the kitchen to sift the flour for tomorrow's blueberry-chocolate chip scones.

Continuing your women's history research, you stumble upon a White House Web site with a biography of Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. Your interest is piqued, but you are disturbed by Mrs. Cheney's bulbous red clown nose and can't make out her unmade-up face in the photograph. Once you decide to read the text, you realize this is a bitingly satirical Web site http://www.whitehouse.org/administration/lynne.asp. It appears that the vice president attempted to censor the parody of his wife, prompting the Web site creator to disguise Mrs. Cheney's image with the clown nose.

Now you feel you must see the photograph of the undisguised Mrs. Cheney, so you connect to the Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/collections/web/advanced.html, sponsored by the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/index.php. The Wayback Machine allows you to travel to original Internet pages before their subsequent alteration or removal. Popping the Web site address of Mrs. Cheney's clown-nosed biography page into the Wayback Machine delivers you to her unadulterated photograph http://web.archive.org/web/20020602142554re_/www.whitehouse.org/administration/lynne.asp from pre-censorship attempts. "I like her frosted fronds," exclaims your friend who has just joined you...she has a project on the politics of hair design due tomorrow.

—Nina Cascio and Rick McRae, University Libraries