Oldest catalogue of the Web – The WWW Virtual Library
Added to the Museum of Data by Megan Williams on Monday, April 19, 2021. Museum of Data Collection ID: 778.
Public description: The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the Internet's oldest scholarly catalogue. Structured around overarching disciplines such as agriculture, international affairs or society, users can navigate the website and find academic information on specific subjects from poultry science to microcredit and microfinance. It was founded in 1991 at CERN in Geneva by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and the World Wide Web. A loose confederation of volunteers compile pages of main links for particular fields on which they are experts; while not being the largest index of the Web, the VL pages are generally regarded as among the highest-quality guides to specific parts of the Web.
Materials used: Algorithms and source codes, Times New Romans font (size 12) and hyperlinks
Credit: Tim Berners-Lee
Copyright: © The WWW Virtual Library
Language: English
Size: Over time, the Virtual Library has expanded to include about 300 sub-libraries inside the main library. As such, I conceptualize my object as a series of links, running between websites, without any geographical bounds. In addition, the creator, Tim Berners-Lee, is recorded to stipulate: “In July and August 1991 there were from ten to one hundred `hits' (pages viewed) a day” (Weaving the Web, Harper Business ISBN 0-06-251587-X, pp. 47 & 49). Framing the website's size not only in its expanding composition, but also by the number of users generating traffic on the pages.
Creation date: 1991/05/20 00:00:00
Other date: 1992/11/03 16:58:00
Alternate titles: "The World Wide Web Virtual Library", "WWW Virtual Library", "WWWVL", "WWW-VL"
External link: https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/Archives/CoombsPapers.html
Tags: 7, 8, 10, 15
