How old are those museum domains?
Having been part of the early museums and the web scene (we started around 1995) we at InvisibleStudio had the curiosity of retrace some of the early dates of museum websites.
Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to reconstruct with precision those early years – the only source usually is the meritorious Internet Archive, which saves websites year after year, but there is no way to be sure that the first archived version is really the first website or the first date of publication. So we headed for a different source: the domain name registration date, which gives us a more precise moment when a museum decided to invest on a web domain.
These are the domain registration dates of the 10 most visited museums in the world:
** This is an approximate date for the first website publication as stated on https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw98/papers/bowen/bowen_paper.html – unfortunately we were unable to find the registration date of nhm.ac.uk.
As we can see, the most precocious seems to be the American Museum of Natural History, born only 2 years after the official launch of the web by Tim Berners-Lee, while the National Museum of China is the youngest, dating back “only” to 2008.
If you were part of that adventure and have some memories to share, please contact us, we’d love to hear from you! And if you're into web history, check out our paper Museum Websites of the First Wave: The rise of the virtual museum