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Fomasi_2023_Internet Histories_Genealogy of an archive
Journal article

Genealogy of an archive : the birth, construction, and development of the World Wide Web collection at CERN

  • Fomasi, Martin ORCID Istituto Media e Giornalismo (IMeG), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Barcella, Deborah Istituto Media e Giornalismo (IMeG), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Benecchi, Eleonora ORCID Istituto Media e Giornalismo (IMeG), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Balbi, Gabriele ORCID Istituto Media e Giornalismo (IMeG), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
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  • 2023
Published in:
  • Internet histories. - 2023, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 277-294
Web history
CERN archive
WWW collection
English Web and Internet historians have never been able to consider the sources preserved at CERN because of a 30-year closure law. The WWW collection is of major importance not only because it is located where the Web was born but, more importantly, because it preserves documents produced during the early and little-known stages of its development. Our study has a qualitative approach and is based on in-person discussions, e-mail exchanges, and a focus group we conducted with five main actors responsible for the birth and development of the WWW collection at CERN. Through this method, we co-constructed with them a discourse, which we later analysed through inductive thematic analysis. We extracted six main topics reflecting the principal themes represented in the collection: reasons for creating a specific collection of web-related documents; salient moments in the history of the collection; discussion about its naming; issues about the originality of the documents; and future digitisation projects. This paper may be of interest to web historians and archivists looking for an overview and hidden reasons for the creation of the collection.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Information, communication and media sciences
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1330073
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