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Web archives are increasingly considered key infrastructure for web histories, yet the story of their initial development is often overlooked. Paying attention to the period between the emergence of the web and the first web archives, this article asks: how was the archived web conceived as an object of knowledge? And how have its conceptual origins shaped web archives as a window into the web’s past? Drawing on ethnographic and historical research at one of the first web archiving institutions, the National Library of Australia, it details how systems, standards, and skills in use at the library were applied to a nascent web. It shows how archiving the web became both conceivable and actionable by library workers as they came to understand and act on various web-based materials as types of publications. Reflecting on this history, this article argues that present-day web archives have inherited both strengths and limitations from the older knowledge infrastructures from which they emerged. By detailing the messy, incremental path of infrastructural development, this article extends recent STS-inflected work on web archives as epistemic agents, adding a historical dimension to our understanding of how web archives enable and constrain particular ways of knowing the web’s past.

The invention of the archived web: tracing the influence of library frameworks on web archiving infrastructure