The Archive is kept by one person. It is a deliberately small project — between twelve and twenty new museum entries each year, and roughly the same number of essays. The collection is not comprehensive and is not meant to be. It is curated in the older sense of the word, by which I mean: chosen with care, annotated by hand, and assumed to be of interest only to a small number of readers.
How entries are accessioned
A site enters the museum after I have spent some weeks reading it. I produce an archival snapshot, write a curatorial note of around 800 to 1,500 words, and assign it a number in the catalogue. Nothing about this process is automated. The catalogue is intentionally manual; the lag is the point.
Colophon
The site is built in semantic HTML and CSS, with no JavaScript framework. It uses two typefaces — EB Garamond, by Georg Duffner, for display and headings, and Source Serif 4, by Frank Grießhammer for Adobe, for body text. Both are open-licensed.
Hosting is on a small static-file server. The source is in a private git repository; pull requests are not accepted, but corrections by email are welcome.
Other archives worth your time
This is one of a small number of sites in this tradition. I recommend, without ranking:
- One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age — Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's GeoCities recovery project.
- The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine — the irreplaceable backbone of all of this.
- Cameron's World — an immersive collage of GeoCities material.
- Web Design Museum — a more design-history-oriented collection.
Contact
archive@example.com — for corrections, additions, and the occasional letter. I read everything but reply slowly.