thearchivist.funA demonstration of working together on screens
Doug Engelbart and his team showed an integrated vision of interactive computing in December 1968.
A SOURCE-LED INDEX
Explore the archive.
704 records: sourced internet history, research methods and community contributions, followed by the original art project.
Search and filter ↗A proposal connects documents across institutions
Tim Berners-Lee proposed an information system at CERN that became the World Wide Web.
A small amplifier changes the scale of electronics
The point-contact transistor demonstrated a practical alternative to vacuum-tube amplification.
A smile turned sideways
A punctuation face offered a practical way to mark jokes in a text-only conversation.
A snapshot of public code reaches the Arctic Code Vault
On 8 July 2020, the GitHub Archive Program's physical preservation copy was deposited in the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard. GitHub reported the completed delivery on 16 July. The material came from a snapshot of active p
A user proposes the Twitter hashtag
On August 23, 2007, Chris Messina used a hashtag proposal to group related Twitter messages through a shared textual marker.
A waived platform fee becomes Bandcamp Friday
On 20 March 2020, Bandcamp waived its revenue share to support artists and labels affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In its subsequent account, the company reported that listeners spent 4.3 million US dollars on music an
ActivityPub gives the social web a shared delivery language
On 23 January 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium published ActivityPub as a Recommendation. The specification described two related ways for social software to communicate: a client-to-server interface for a person's ap
All Your Base becomes a remix language
An awkward game translation became material for songs, image edits, and a collective catchphrase.
Alternative text
Alternative text gives a route to information or function when an image cannot be perceived visually. Its content depends on why the image appears. An informative image needs the relevant meaning; a functional image need
An ordinary zoo visit opens a video platform
The first YouTube upload, Me at the Zoo, appeared on April 23, 2005, with an unusually ordinary subject.
AOL Instant Messenger signs off after twenty years
On 6 October 2017 Oath, the company formed from AOL and Yahoo under Verizon, announced that AOL Instant Messenger would be discontinued on 15 December 2017. AIM had launched in 1997. In the announcement, Michael Albers o
App Inventor opens mobile creation to beginners
Google released an App Inventor trial in July 2010, using graphical blocks to help beginners create Android applications.
ArchiveWeb.page: preserve what you browse
ArchiveWeb.page captures web content while you navigate through it, using a browser extension or desktop application. It suits small research collections, exhibitions and interactive pages where a person can deliberately
ARPANET connects four early sites
ARPANET began operating as a four-node research network in 1969.
AskReddit turns a question into a collective artifact
AskReddit began in January 2008, building a format where a simple prompt could produce an expansive shared conversation.
Attribution
Attribution answers who should receive credit and where a reader can find the material. Creative Commons recommends keeping title, author, source, and license information together when attributing licensed works. In prac
Audit a source list before publishing
A source list can look impressive while containing dead links, repeated citations, and pages that support only part of a claim. A pre-publication audit is a reading task as much as a link check. The goal is to make the p
Audit contribution points against actual decisions
Treat recognition as an accounting question: every balance should be explainable from accepted work and documented reversals.
Authenticity and accuracy
Authenticity asks whether an object is what it is represented to be in a specified sense. Accuracy asks whether a statement corresponds to the relevant facts. A genuine screenshot can accurately show that a person made a
Back up a personal research archive and test the restore
A folder full of exports is reassuring only if the files contain the work you expect and can be restored. Treat backup as a small repeatable experiment: identify what matters, copy it, recover a sample, and write down wh
Badger Badger Badger and the endless loop
A Flash cartoon turned repetition and tiny interruptions into a musical joke.
Bandcamp makes an independent release easier to deliver
Bandcamp's 2008 introduction focused on reliable artist websites, streaming, downloads, metadata, and direct presentation of music.
Bebo files for bankruptcy five years after AOL paid 850 million dollars
Bloomberg Law reported on 17 May 2013 that Bebo.com had filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. AOL had bought Bebo in March 2008 for 850 million dollars a
Bernie's mittens become a portable seat
An inauguration photograph supplied a cutout figure that editors could place almost anywhere.
Blender becomes an open-source creative tool
After a fundraising campaign, Blender's source code became available under the GNU GPL on October 13, 2002.
Bluesky opens federation to self-hosted data servers
On 22 February 2024, Bluesky announced that its network was opening to federation, initially with a release intended for self-hosters. People with the necessary technical knowledge could operate a personal data server in
Browsertrix: collect a defined web collection
Browsertrix is a Webrecorder project for automated web archiving. Its documentation covers crawling, importing and exporting archives, publishing collections, and running the system on your own infrastructure. It is usef
Build a collection that answers a question
A collection becomes valuable when its selection and order help someone accomplish something. Before adding another item, write a one-sentence purpose: understand a controversy, teach a concept, compare versions, or prep
Build a dossier for conflicting origin claims
Preserve competing accounts without making the interface pretend that an unresolved origin has one settled answer.
Build image credits that survive reuse
An image can become separated from its credit as soon as it moves from a browser tab into a slide, article, or archive folder. Build the credit at the moment of selection, while the source information is still available.
C2PA publishes a first specification for media provenance
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity released version 1.0 of its technical specification on 26 January 2022. The specification described a way to attach signed provenance information to digital media, in
C2PA: understand what content provenance can establish
C2PA develops an open technical standard for content provenance, commonly presented as Content Credentials. The official FAQ explains signed information about the creation and editing of digital media and the mechanisms
Calibrate an appraisal with a second reader
A useful rubric makes disagreement inspectable. Try this exercise before treating a total score as a reliable editorial signal.
Captions
Captions let a viewer follow spoken words and meaningful sounds as a video or other synchronized media plays. Useful captions can identify speakers and communicate audio information such as laughter or an alarm when it m
Capture a web page as evidence
A bookmark remembers a location. A useful capture also records what was present when you inspected it. Web pages can change, load different material for different visitors, and depend on services that an archive cannot p
Capture date
A capture date describes a preservation action. It differs from the date an author created a work, the date a publisher released it, and the date you later accessed the saved copy. A page captured in 2020 can contain a d
CERN releases core Web software to the public domain
A CERN statement removed licensing barriers around core World Wide Web software in April 1993.
CERN’s web history: inspect the original problem
CERN's material about the birth of the Web connects a familiar technology with the practical information-sharing needs of a research institution. It is useful for grounding an introduction to web history in a specific se
CHAOSS: measure whether a community can sustain its work
CHAOSS develops metrics, models and software for understanding open-source community health. Its resources are useful when raw activity counts do not explain whether a project is responsive, welcoming or sustainable. The
ChatGPT makes iterative prompting a public interface
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT as a public research preview on 30 November 2022. The release presented a conversational interface in which a person could ask follow-up questions, revise a request and continue working within a
Check a viral claim with an evidence ledger
A viral post often combines an authentic image, a doubtful date, and an exaggerated interpretation. Treating the whole post as simply true or false can hide the part that actually needs investigation. An evidence ledger
Common Crawl: research the web as a dataset
Common Crawl provides web crawl data and documentation for working with it. It is useful for questions about language, links or publication patterns across many pages, especially when you can describe the exact crawl and
Compare meme variants with a shared rubric
Two images can look almost identical and perform different social work. A useful comparison examines both the artifact and the setting in which it appears. Begin with a small, explicit rubric so you do not choose a new e
Computer History Museum oral histories: preserve a speaker’s perspective
The Computer History Museum's oral histories offer accounts from people involved in computing. They are useful for questions that technical specifications alone cannot answer: how teams worked, what constraints people re
Content Credentials
Content Credentials can record assertions about creation and processing and use cryptographic mechanisms to make the signed information tamper-evident. A validator can report whether credentials are present and how they
Contributor Covenant: write expectations people can use
Contributor Covenant is a code-of-conduct resource for digital communities. It helps projects communicate expectations about behavior and participation. It is useful when an archive begins accepting corrections, submissi
Controlled vocabulary
A controlled vocabulary gives editors a shared set of labels so related records can be found reliably. It can specify preferred spellings, synonyms, and distinctions between terms. For a small archive, this may be a shor
Creative Commons makes reuse permissions easier to communicate
Creative Commons launched its first public copyright licenses in December 2002.
Creative Commons: understand the license before remixing
Creative Commons provides standard licenses that creators can use to communicate reuse permissions. The official license overview is useful when choosing material for an archive or deciding how to share your own work. It
Cryptographic hash
A cryptographic hash produces a fixed-size digest from input data. For archival work, it can help check whether a file matches a previously recorded copy. NIST documents standardized families of hash functions; use an ap
CSS separates visual rules from document structure
The first CSS Recommendation offered a shared language for styling web documents.
Dancing Baby escapes the demo
A demonstration of character animation became a spectacle far beyond its software audience.
Data schema
A schema states which fields a record can contain, which are required, what types they accept, and how records relate. A useful project schema also explains meaning: date might mean event date, while reviewDate describes
Date uncertainty
Uncertainty, approximation, and missing precision are different problems. You may know that an event happened in a particular year but not its month; you may suspect a year without being sure; or a source may intentional
Decide whether two submissions are duplicates or variants
A repeated URL is an intake issue. A changed artifact can be a meaningful part of the historical record.
Deduplication
Deduplication reduces repeated representations, but the definition of same depends on the collection. Two posts can contain the same image while remaining distinct historical instances. Two records can describe one event
Derivative
In an archival workflow, derivative describes a practical relationship: one file or artifact was produced from another. A cropped image, translated caption, compressed video, or annotated screenshot can be recorded this
Describe a meme image for the current task
An image description should let a reader follow the point of the record, including meaningful text and the relationships inside the image.
Describe memes accessibly without explaining away the joke
A meme can depend on words, facial expression, panel order, and shared background knowledge. A useful text alternative helps someone access those elements without forcing every detail into one oversized sentence. Start b