Things have been cooking at NYPL ever since Josh Greenberg came to run our digital library. Earlier this year, he announced NYPL Labs, where you can get a peek at the library’s digital works in progress. Today, he and his crew soft launched a redesign of the NYPL Digital Gallery, which now provides access to more than 7,000 items from our collections.

Big can be good. I didn’t think that SXSWi could be good big. Last year, with more than 6,000 in attendance, the event felt like it was about to spill over the edges, and like all of the creative juice that I normally drink up there would get soaked up by the pavement.

Even though this year’s festival was attended by more than ever, some 7,500+, it felt as cohesive as it did in 2003. It still feels like the place to be if you have any interest in staying in tune with the filed.

And, man, do I love hanging out in Austin, especially with my kid.

My new colleague, Jacob Nadal, points out an important difference between the preservation and prservability of blogs and other objects.

Helping someone make their blog (or anything) preservable is a matter of using well-documented and doggedly implemented standards, and creating effective safety nets against catastrophe…

He then goes on to outline the requirements for truly preserving a digital object.

Nadal, who just came to NYPL from Indiana University, and I came up with a question/thought exercise that might help define some of the requirements for documenting and preserving (aspects of) the early web. If you were to create an exhibition about the history of web design, what objects would you want to include, and how would you want to display them?

I would start the show by talking about the introduction of internet protocols and hypertext languages. The show would begin in the 1960’s and quickly sweep through the70’s and 80’s. I am not sure if I could tell the story by presenting significant correspondences and articles on paper, or if I would need to find a way of presenting early digital work on forgotten-platform emulators.

Later, in a discussion of the professionalization of web design, I would want to display books by people like Linda Weinman and Roger Black. Digital representations of those books would not do; I would want to show the physical book.

So, in addition to web browsers and pages, my show would certainly contain paper and other pre-web technologies. It would be a hybrid show about a hybrid era.

What would you want to include in this exhibition, and what do your curatorial instincts tell us about the nature of the web?