The Web That Was
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for April 2003
I just held Woodrow Wilson’s Nobel Peace Prize medal in my hand. Quite an experience. I was recently in Washington to give a talk at the Library of Congress, and a friend asked me if I was interested in going down to the Rare Books Room with him to see some interesting goodies. Well, I love that stuff as much as the next person, so I said sure.
When we got there, I pretty quickly discovered we were in for more than just the Houdini memorabilia I was expecting. In a beautifully appointed room, the first thing we saw was an incunabulum—“nothing special” according to our host, Clark Evans of LC’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, but still a nice appetizer. Then came Wilson’s medal (gold, and very heavy). As it turns out, my friend had mentioned his interest in presidential history, so we then were treated to peeks at a volume of Jefferson’s with some rare marginalia, the Bible used at Lincoln’s first inauguration, and a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth. Evans had a meeting to go to, so he began to pack up; but he mentioned that he had a couple of other things we might like to see.
He returned shortly with a nondescript archival box, from which he extracted a single sheet—one of the first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence. (The one most recently sold fetched $8 million at auction.) Even if I hadn’t had a cold, that one would have taken my breath away.
Just being in the presence of these artifacts was awe-inspiring. The juxtaposition of the Bible and the wanted poster was chilling, parenthesizing the few short, tumultuous years between Lincoln’s inauguration and assassination.
Thrilling tangibility
So what was it about these items that made them so special? Some of them, of course, are unique; others were once plentiful but are now rare. But more than just their uncommonness sets them apart: Each of them stands for something, represents an event or a time or a person, and it is their very tangibility that fascinates and spellbinds, generations or centuries after their creation. Few of these objects have “informational” value per se; what we can learn from them lies in their artifactual qualities and provenance.
I couldn’t help but wonder about the future history of the Internet. The Internet Archive Project is trying to preserve the look and feel of Web sites from the last several years; you can use it to watch the evolution of individual sites and pages and of the Web itself, how Web design and architecture have changed, the continual infusion of graphics and animation, and the ongoing complication of the Web.
These “old” Web pages are rare in their own way; and not unlike the rare books, you have to go somewhere special to see and experience them. But of course they’re not tangible, and it somehow seems unlikely that future generations will be held enthralled in the same way.
On the other hand, while there has always been some nostalgia for technologies of the past—the Apple I with the handmade woodburned case at the Smithsonian is a kick—there does seem to be at least a little wistfulness for the experience as much as the hardware of the computer age. For example, old arcade games have been reformatted to be downloaded and played on modern computers (I spent more than a few hours with Space Invaders and Qix way back when).
As we think about the preservation and documentation of this past, we will need to contemplate what people are going to want to see and to know, and what they will respond to and why they will care. That’s inherent in all the work of collection building and management of course; yet it’s worth pondering how we will need to reconceptualize our notions of cultural heritage in the decades to come. It’s funny to imagine, isn’t it—a “museum” of old Web pages—but that’s another story.
Worth Viewing
When the Web was young, it was still possible to know much of what was there, and the best place to keep up was the What’s New page, from the folks who gave us Mosaic. The archives of those pages are still available and provide a tour down memory lane for those of us old enough to remember those heady days.
The What’s New Archives.
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