Ditial history and the early days of the Web

September 21, 1993, Dr. Lynn H. Nelson a history professor at the University of Kansas posted the first link on a new web-based index of historical resources. The project was part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library, a larger initiated aimed at cataloging web resources. The WWW Virtual Library (WWW-VL) was created in 1991 by the founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee as a user supported index of web-based resources in topical areas. Although the number of resources available through the WWW-VL is now dwarfed by commercial providers, the index continues to be actively updated and used. A parallel virtual community has sprung alongside the WWW-VL, as contributors and maintainers, like Lynn Nelson, continue to collect, vet, organize and publish Web and Internet based resources in dozens of topical areas.

In the early 1990s, work with historical resources on the Web by historians like Lynn Nelson reflected a change in how educators at all levels interacted with and used historical resources. At that time, computers were mostly valued for their computational functions in quantitatively-oriented historical analyses. Although the development of personal computer in the 1980s did spawn some textual/narrative history-related projects, such as the American Social History Projects' Who Built America CDs, these software driven computer applications were limited in their impact. It was not until the Web enabled the mass publication of historical resources and narratives, that the discipline of history began to be influenced (Ayers, 1999, Rosenzweig, 2002). Now, we are able to engage in more substantive discussions about how to create and use these digital historical resources.