Born digital paper sources: exploring offline web archives
Kees Teszelszky  1@  
1 : Kees Teszelszky  (curator digital collections)

The worldwide web was born in 1992 with a website that contained a list of hyperlinks. Then came the first web directories. But as the WWW expanded in its early years, analogue paper publications still continued to play an important role in web navigation, web communication and user discovery of new content. These sources include directories and Internet magazines, but also, for example, the conference bundle of the first WWW conference, catalogues of website builders and manuals on how to find your way on the Internet. In this presentation, I will show which analogue sources of the early web have been in the Netherlands, what the historical value of these sources can be and what these sources tell us about the history of the early web. In doing so, I will argue that analogue web archives are an important source of the vanished early web in addition to the information that can be extracted from digital web archives. In addition, I will show that precisely such paper sources have not been well preserved by libraries and that now is the time to collect such material.


Online user: 2 Privacy
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