moshkow.nino.ru was a Nizhny Novgorod mirror of Maxim Moshkow's online library (Lib.Ru), listed in the nn.ru directory under the "/rub/" section. The site was accessible at http://moshkow.nino.ru/ and itself included itself in the list of mirrors of the main library alongside the domain nnov.ru[1]. The earliest snapshot preserved in the web archive is dated May 5, 2001; by the time of the census the site no longer had its own domain.

The library catalog and how it grew

The home page was a mirror of the classic Lib.Ru, with the same sections and the same navigation as the original: "Search: Prose Translations Poetry Fantasy Detective fiction History and others," alongside links "New arrivals," "Hit parade," "Samizdat," "Forum," "Mirrors"[1]. As the home page stated in 2001, this was "the best-known electronic www-library in Runet, opened in 1994," and its volume as of February 16, 2001 was 2200 Mb[1]. By December 2002 the volume had grown to 3.6 Gb, the sections "Music" and "Abroad" were added to the page, and the library began to be updated not only by readers but by the authors themselves[2]. By the snapshot dated June 6, 2003 (the page itself displayed this date on a later archive visit), the volume had reached 4.2 Gb, a "Tourism" section had appeared, and a "Shop" menu item[3]. The library listed awards — "RIF-2001, Teneta98, POTOP99, 108luchshikh, GoldSite98" in 2001, later joined by "NIR-2003," "POTOP," and "IT-100"[1][3], and among its partners were the publishing houses "Vagrius" and "Eksmo"[1]. The catalog sections — from "Contemporary Russian Prose" and "Foreign Prose" to "Old Literature" and "Children's and Adventure Fiction" — were accompanied by counters of new arrivals by date, and one of the sections was regularly adorned with a quotation: as the home page reported, in 2005 the science fiction section opened with the words "There is nothing new in this, for there is nothing new at all," signed by Nicholas Roerich[3].

Nizhny Novgorod affiliation and standing in the ratings

The project was listed in the nn.ru directory under the "/rub/" section, and in every preserved snapshot it listed itself among the mirrors of Lib.Ru alongside the domain nnov.ru — together with dozens of other mirrors across the country (primorye.ru, kazan.ru, samara.ru, and others)[1][2][3]. In the preserved samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating and in the participant lists of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, no votes for the project were recorded — this reflects an absence of data in the available sample, not zero traffic. For more on the methodology behind collecting such data, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Closure

The last known snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated February 8, 2009; the earlier crawled versions span the period from May 5, 2001. The project no longer had its own domain by the time of the census. Like many regional mirrors of central services at the turn of the 2000s, moshkow.nino.ru existed as a subdomain of the provider nino.ru and disappeared along with the infrastructure it was hosted on — the census materials contain no information about a move to another address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)