Collection websites

Open the box exactly as it stands.

Inside may be an old website, twenty seasons of programmes, recordings, scans, photographs, and PDFs that lost their way home. Some folders name their contents beautifully. Others remember only that someone in 2011 understood what final2 meant.

Do not catalogue it for us. Give us the collection untidied, uncertain, and full of loose ends. It already knows enough to begin.

Give it a public shape

Folders become sections. Text and photographs become pages. Documents, recordings and other files receive stable addresses of their own. Search crosses the whole collection.

Names, file types, dates, languages and neighbouring files provide the first order. Where the evidence stops, the site can simply say date unknown or found beside the 2008 programme. Nothing needs an invented fact before it may be seen.

Old addresses continue into the new collection. When an exact page no longer exists, the nearest useful destination receives the visitor.

Rooms in this wing of imagination

• The publication outlived its software. Recover the pages without reviving the system beneath them.
• Every edition kept a different memory. Bring the history of a recurring event into one public sequence.
• The project is finished. Keep its public record published after its people move on.
• The folders contain a public archive. Turn them outward so strangers can enter.