Reconstructing a website's lost past Methodological issues concerning the history of Unibo.it.

This paper describes how to deal with the scarcity of born-digital primary sources while retrieving materials on the recent past of an academic institution. The case study is an analysis of the first 25 years online of the University of Bologna. The focus of this work is primarily methodological: several different issues are presented, starting with the fact that the University of Bologna website has been excluded for thirteen years from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and possible solutions are proposed and applied. Moreover, this study aims at highlighting how web materials could give us new and distinct insights into the recent past of academic institutions, thereby becoming the starting point for several new studies.