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?