SGER: Plan for a History of the Internet Digital Archive

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This SGER will explore the possibility of identifying, locating, and then creating an open, easily accessible digital archive of important materials that document the activities, policies, and processes that contributed to the evolution of the Internet. Records of the R&D carried out between 1968 (the initiation of networking R&D at DARPA) and 1985 (the decommissioning of the NSFNet) are fragile. As time passes, records are lost or dispersed, making it impossible or very costly to recover. Many of the records of that period are informal (e.g., email) and may never be recovered unless steps are taken now to locate and acquire them. In addition, the former government officials and academic partners who participated in this early R&D are getting older. Steps need to be taken now to insure that all important participants from that period have been interviewed and that their personal records of that period be made available where possible. Partnerships are being established with the Computer History Museum, and other archives, which have already begun to collect some of these materials, as well as with the George Washington University's ECHO Program, which is devoted to exploring and collecting history online. The approach taken here is to be bring all these disparate resources together and to become systematic about what needs to be collected to make this Internet archive a definitive, exhaustive collection. The information generated during this research and then made available in the archive to future researchers will contribute to more accurate understandings of the synergy of university-government-industry collaboration and the linkages of science and technology policy, R &D and education to advances in technology, the economy and society.