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

Abstract

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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