The story so far:

• The World Wide Web consists of millions of documents, images, sounds, movies and databases linked together to form a ... ummm ... web. Just point and click at a hypertext link and you could be whisked around the world (or dragged slowly and painfully across the trans-Pacific cable, depending on the network load).

• There's lots of useful stuff out there on the WWW (and lots of kindly people creating indexes, guides and robots to help you find them).

But some of you remain unbelievers. Perhaps you've looked around on the WWW and couldn't find anything on your pet topic. It happens. There's no organising authority directing the development of resources. The Internet is not an encyclopedia, is a communication medium. But if you can't find what you want, don't complain, create. Do it yourself!

This presentation is about moving beyond being just a consumer of Internet resources and becoming a creator of Internet resources. Using the WWW, you can publish all sorts of material concerning your archive on the Internet, and it's not that hard.

Why would you want to publish on the WWW?

The huge number of businesses currently racing to develop WWW sites indicates that there are gains to be had out there in cyberspace, even before the problem of secure financial transactions has been worked out. Some reasons why you might want to develop a WWW presence include:

• Vanity
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Community benefit

Vanity

Well, you must admit it, it's always nice to see your name in print, even if it is on a screen. Those of you with egos to build and evenings to spare might even become WWW gurus, attracting fan-email from around the world. Aaahh.

Example: http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/staff/tpsbiog.htm - Guess who! I'm waiting for your email ...

Marketing Your Institution

Gone are the days when marketing was something that only the private sector engaged in. We all have to establish a public profile for our institutions if they are to justify their existence. You can use the WWW to provide:

• Information on who you are and what you do - the WWW equivalent of the glossy brochure. Drag out your logo and your mission statement and let the world know you exist.

• Some details of your history. Recount your past achievements, publish a few historical photographs ("this is a photo of our first compactus" etc).

• Profiles of your staff. If you're brave enough you might even let your staff create their own home pages, informing all of their hobbies and perversions.

• Electronic versions of your newsletters and annual reports.

• A listing of your products and services - all important in these days of cost-recovery.

• Exhibitions. Be adventurous - , an illuminating treatise on the nature of archival work, or perhaps a pictorial exposition of the last office Christmas party. Remember, you can include photos, sounds and even movie clips in WWW documents.

Examples:

• History of Australian Science Newsletter - http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/hasn/hasn_inf.htm
• ASAP's Archival Processing Services - http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/asap_pro.htm
• University of Sydney Archives - http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/archives/

Customer Service

Once you've told everyone about your services, you then have to be able to deliver them. Here again the WWW can be useful, providing:

• Basic information like phone numbers and email addresses.

• Details of opening hours and access procedures.

• News updates - for getting out that urgent information between newsletters, or for making it seem like you're a really dynamic, happening place.

• Feedback - Gasp! Yes, your customers can talk to you. This can range from a simple "mailto" link that takes advantage of your WWW browser's built-in email capability, through to a query form that can be filled out and sent off through the WWW.

• Finding aids - these too can range from just summaries of some of your major collections through to detailed, searchable guides.

• A distribution service for documents or software - files can easily be downloaded over the WWW.

Community benefit

Of course, it's not just a matter of self-interest. By providing information over the WWW we can help make our archival resources more accessible. We can encourage further research, we can develop interest in Australia's heritage. Currently there is not that much available that provides information on resources in Australian history - you could make a substantial difference.

Examples:

• Bright SPARCS - information on archival holdings relating to over 1,000 Australian scientists - http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/bsparcshome.htm
• Directory of Archives in Australia - http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/asa/directory/asa_dir.htm

How do you start?

First, some reassurance - you don't have to be an IT expert to create WWW documents, in fact, it may help to not be an IT expert. If you can mark-up text as you would to send to a printer or typesetter, you can create HTML documents.

HTML is simply HyperText Markup Language. As with all living languages, HTML is still evolving and different browsers sometimes speak slightly different dialects. The main thing to remember is that documents can look different depending on which browser is used to view them. For those of you who are interested in the detailed specifications, check out:

• HTML Summary List - http://www.rpi.edu/~decemj/pages/intro.html

• HTML Specifications - http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/HTML.html

What does HTML look like?

Have a look at the following piece of text (in blue):

In HTML this text might look something like this (also in blue):

<H1>The Internet - What it can do for the Archivist</H1>

<H2>Advertising your Archives on the WWW</H2>

<I>By Tim Sherratt</I>

This talk covers:

<UL>

<LI>The WWW as a marketing tool

<LI>Advertising your archives on the WWW

<LI>Other neat stuff

</UL>

Your first thought is YUK! But look again, the top heading is surrounded by <H1>..</H1> tags - Get it? H1 means first level Heading. The <I>..</I> tags say to put the author's name in Italics. <UL>..</UL> gives you an Unnumbered List, each separate item flagged with an <LI> tag. Easy huh? The hard work is done by the server and client software that read the tags and do all the formatting for you. Of course, there are a lot more tags and things can get fairly complicated for heavily formatted documents, but the principles stay the same.

You can get started creating HTML documents with just a plain old text editor or word processing package, simply type the tags in and save the file as plain text (ASCII). Or if you prefer the soft option you can get yourself a dedicated HTML editor. These are available for just about every platform and are generally available as shareware. The following lists will point you in the right direction:

• Yahoo's list - http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/World_Wide_Web/HTML_Editors
• W3 Organisation's list - http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Tools/
• Highly recommended for Windows - Hotdog http://www.sausage.com/

We can't really go into much detail in a session like this, but hopefully you are enthused enough to start doing some investigating yourselves. The WWW itself provides an excellent training ground. There are a rapidly growing number of guides and tutorials available online:

• A Beginner's Guide to HTML - http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html
• HTML Tutorial - http://pcd.stanford.edu/mogens/intro/tutorial.html
• Writing HTML - http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/

And whenever you come across a WWW page that makes you think "Wow! How did they do that?", find out exactly how they did it by using the "View Source" command on your browser. This lets you see the raw HTML underlying the document, so you can examine the tags that were used and try them in your own documents.

Once you've created your HTML documents ...

Then you can make them available to the world by placing them on a WWW server connected to the Internet. WWW servers are just software programs that sit around and wait for WWW browsers to send requests to them. Gone are the days when you had to be a Unix head to even think of running a WWW server. You can now get versions for Macs and Windows machines.

So what are waiting for?

The WWW is an exciting publishing medium that offers even small organisations the chance to develop a significant national, even international, profile.

Tim Sherratt
ASAP Canberra
July 1995