Library Web Archive — Library Culture on the Web, 2008–2010

This section exists because the domain had an earlier life. Between 2008 and 2010, libraryweb.info was a small web magazine about libraries and reading culture online. The current Library Web is a different publication with a different scope, and the archive is where we account for the earlier one instead of quietly pretending it never happened.

The practical reason is continuity. Old links still exist in bookmarks, forum posts, blogrolls and search indexes, and a visitor who follows one deserves an explanation rather than a missing page. The editorial reason is that the earlier project was writing about a subject we still write about, at a moment when the answers were far less settled.

What the earlier site was

It was a web magazine about libraries and reading culture online: the subject we now spread across Digital Library, Reading & Culture and The Modern Library, written when much of it was speculative rather than routine.

We describe it only in those terms. We do not have a verified inventory of what it published, and reconstructing titles, authors or figures from memory would produce exactly the kind of plausible invention this site is written to avoid. If a specific page from that period is ever recovered and verified, it can be republished here with a note about its date. Until then, the archive documents the project rather than impersonating it.

Why 2008 to 2010 was an interesting moment

The period is worth understanding on its own, and general facts about it are easy to state without inventing anything.

Those years sat between two versions of the web. Independent blogs and RSS were still a primary way to follow a subject, before social platforms absorbed most of that traffic. Large-scale book digitization had moved from experiment to fact, and the legal and practical questions it raised were live. Dedicated e-reader devices had arrived and were being argued about in much the same terms people now use for other formats. Library catalogues were beginning to be judged against consumer search engines, and mostly losing on interface while winning on precision.

For a small site writing about libraries online, all of that was open ground. Whether readers would abandon print, whether libraries could compete with a search box, whether digitization was preservation or merely access: these were unresolved questions rather than settled ones. Some have since been answered, several turned out to be the wrong questions, and a few are still open. Future of Knowledge is where we take up the ones that remain.

How the archive is treated

Three rules govern this section.

Nothing is invented. No reconstructed article lists, no traffic figures, no claims about influence or readership. Where we do not know, the archive says so.

It is secondary. The archive is not the front of the site and is not meant to compete with current writing for a reader’s attention. It sits at the end of the section order deliberately. A visitor who lands here from an old link should be able to leave for something current in one step.

It is honest about redirection. Where an old address can be matched to something we publish now, the sensible answer is to send the reader to the closest equivalent rather than to an error page. Where no equivalent exists, the address is allowed to fail rather than be dumped on the home page, because a redirect that lands nowhere useful wastes the visitor’s time and tells a search engine something untrue about the page.

One address is kept as a page instead of being redirected at all. The old article directory, /articledir.php, was linked to from outside with a fragment on the end naming a section of it, and a fragment never reaches the server. Redirecting the path would throw away the only part of those links that says which subject was meant, so the address still answers, with the two sections that were linked to still at their original anchors.

Surviving external records

Two kinds of evidence about the earlier project survive outside this site. They cover different spans, they were produced by different things, and merging them into one date range would state something neither supports.

Known archived website material: 2008–2010. What independent web archives captured of the site itself. This is the range used everywhere on this site when we describe the magazine, and it is why this page is titled as it is.

Surviving mailing-list archive: February 2007 to November 2011. A public archive of the Libraryweb mailing list, hosted at ibiblio, holds 232 weekly newsletters across 55 months. It is a record of what the list sent, not of what the website published, and it begins about a year before the captured website material and ends about a year after it.

The difference between the two ranges is not a contradiction. A newsletter can run before a site is publishing and continue after it stops, and the archive gives no reason to assume otherwise in either direction. Until something is found that shows the website itself running in 2007 or 2011, we do not say that it was.

Library Web Newsletter Archive, 2007–2011 indexes the mailing list month by month, links each month to the original, and sets out what the newsletters covered.

Why domain history matters more than it sounds

A web address accumulates a record. Pages are cited, linked, quoted and indexed, and that record does not disappear when a site stops publishing. Treating it as inconvenient is the common approach: throw everything at a new home page and hope the visitors sort themselves out. It is a poor answer for a reader and a worse one for anyone trying to trace where a citation went.

There is also a subject-matter argument. This site writes about preservation, about link rot, about what happens to material when nobody is paid to keep it available. It would be difficult to write that honestly while erasing our own earlier record. A domain with a history is a small example of the thing we describe in What Is a Digital Library?: keeping something available is an ongoing act, not a one-off decision, and the default outcome of neglect is loss.

The archived web makes this partly recoverable. Independent web archives captured a great deal of what was published in that period, which is why old sites can often be read even after they disappear from the live web. What a crawler captured is incomplete and uneven, but it is evidence, and evidence is what an archive section should be built from.

What you should read instead

If you arrived here looking for the earlier magazine, the closest current equivalents are straightforward: Digital Library for digitization, metadata and online archives, The Modern Library for what libraries do now that lending is no longer their whole purpose, and Reading & Culture for reading habits across print, screen and audio. All three are linked above and listed in the site menu.

If you remember the earlier site, or hold a copy of something it published, we would like to hear from you. How Library Web is written and checked is set out on the about page.