By JONATHAN P. BOWEN [The Rutherford Journal] – Among the pages that I installed on the OUVL web server was a page with a list of links to museum-related websites that I discovered as I traversed the web, essentially created as a personal bookmarking resource, but also available to anyone else surfing the web. This was part of an ‘archive service’ that I created at OUCL for computing-related resources. Files such as documents had previously been available via FTP and an email service that automatically responded to requests sent as commands by electronic mail, thus allowing those with email-only contact on the Internet to access resources. This was much enhanced by the availability of the OUCL web server and the service is still accessible today as the OUCL Archive Service (see archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk), although some of the resources have since been moved to other web servers.

Realising that museum resources available online could be of great and growing interest to web users, but that finding them could be difficult, I decided I would offer to incorporate my museums web page into the Virtual Library. This was a relatively informal process. On 16 June 1994, I emailed the Virtual Library maintainer, Arthur Secret at CERN, offering my web page for inclusion (see Figure 6). I included the Virtual Library logo (the world with an open book in front of it) at the top of my museums page with a link to the main Virtual Library page (see Figure 7). In return, Arthur Secret added a link to the museums page from the Virtual Library page (see Figure 8).

Very soon the page was receiving a significant number of hits.

Continued at The Rutherford Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.