World Wide Web Virtual Library

Last updated
The WWW Virtual Library
Tim Berners-Lee.jpg
Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Virtual Library
Available in English
Founded1991
Headquarters CERN (in 1991), ,
Area servedWorldwide
Created by Tim Berners-Lee
Founder(s) Tim Berners-Lee
EditorsArthur Secret, et al.
Key people Tim Berners-Lee, Arthur Secret, Bertrand Ibrahim
Services Web directory
URL vlib.org
CommercialNo
Launched1991

The World Wide Web Virtual Library (WWW VL) was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web.

Contents

Overview

The Virtual Library was started by Tim Berners-Lee creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. [1] Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are experts. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or just "the VL".

The individual indexes, or virtual libraries live on hundreds of different servers around the world. A set of index pages linking these individual libraries is maintained at vlib.org, [2] in Geneva only a few kilometres from where the VL began life. A mirror of this index is kept at East Anglia in the United Kingdom. [3]

History

The Virtual Library was first conceived and run by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, and later expanded, organised and managed for several years by Arthur Secret as the "virtual librarian", [4] before it became a formally established association with Gerard Manning as its Council's first chairman. [5] The late Bertrand Ibrahim was a key contributor to the pre-association phase of the Virtual Library's development and then served as its Secretary until his untimely death in 2001 at the age of 46. A brief history, with links to archived pages and screenshots, is maintained on the Vlib website. [5]

The Virtual Library grew over the years. For example, there is the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue, [6] which was launched on 21 September 1993 by Lynn H. Nelson at Kansas University.[ citation needed ] From April 2004, it was relocated at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, where a history of the catalogue is also available. [7] The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) were added by Jonathan Bowen to the Virtual Library to cover museums in 1994. [8]

In 2005, the central WWW Virtual Library website (vlib.org) was taken over by a new member, Michael Chapman, leading to the demise of the project. [9] Access by any other party was denied after a change in password. The elected council, consisting of established maintainers of individual virtual libraries, was ignored, and a new council of non-maintainers with little or no association with the Virtual Library was unilaterally instated. The Virtual Library as a cohesive collective of knowledge websites maintained by experts rapidly waned.

While the Virtual Library as a cooperative of indexed sites, the first on the Web, has ceased to be, many individual virtual library sites continue to be important and valuable academic resources.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Berners-Lee</span> English computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (born 1955)

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web browser</span> Software used to navigate the internet

A web browser is an application for accessing websites and the Internet. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people have used a browser. The most used browser is Google Chrome, with a 65% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mosaic (web browser)</span> Early web browser (1993–1997)

NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldWideWeb</span> First web browser; renamed Nexus

WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ViolaWWW</span> Popular web browser in the early 1990s

ViolaWWW is a discontinued web browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Cailliau</span> Belgian engineer, computer scientist, and co-inventor of the World Wide Web

Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Line Mode Browser</span> Command-line web browser

The Line Mode Browser is the second web browser ever created. The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual Library museums pages</span> Online museum directory

The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) formed an early leading directory of online museums around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canadian Heritage Information Network</span>

The Canadian Heritage Information Network is a special operating agency within the federal Department of Canadian Heritage that provides a networked interface to Canada's heritage institutions. It is based in Gatineau, Quebec, and is administratively merged with the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), another special operating agency of Canadian Heritage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libwww</span>

Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww in late 1992, comprising reusable code from the first browsers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mundaneum</span> Institution aimed to gather together all the worlds knowledge founded in 1910

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span> Information system running in the Internet

The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Kotok</span> American computer scientist

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erwise</span> Discontinued graphical web browser

Erwise is an early discontinued web browser, and the first that was available for the X Window System.

W3 Catalog was an early web search engine, first released on September 2, 1993 by developer Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First International Conference on the World-Wide Web</span>

The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Raggett</span> English computer specialist

Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992. He has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML. Raggett also wrote HTML Tidy and is currently pioneering W3C's work on the Web of Things. He lives in the west of England.

References

  1. Wall, Aaron. "History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today". Search Engine History. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  2. "The WWW Virtual Library". vlib.org. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  3. "The WWW Virtual Library". vlib.org.uk. UK. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  4. Gillies, James; Gillies, Robert (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. p. 245. ISBN   978-0192862075.
  5. 1 2 "History of the Virtual Library". The WWW Virtual Library. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  6. "WWW-VL History Central Catalogue". vlib.iue.it. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  7. "About the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue". WWW-VL History Central Catalogue. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  8. Karp, Cary (October–December 1999). "Setting root on the Internet: Establishing a network identity for the museum community". Museum International . UNESCO. 51 (4): 8–13. doi:10.1111/1468-0033.00223.
  9. "Documents for the History of the destruction of the WWW-VL old project at vlib.org/interarb.com.e" . Retrieved 17 Aug 2023.