medicinenn.boom.ru — the "Medical CATALOG of N.Novgorod," a directory of Nizhny Novgorod hospitals, pharmacies and medical centers that operated in the early 2000s. The site had no domain of its own: it occupied a third-level address in the boom.ru zone. In the rubricator of the Counter.nn.ru counter the catalog is described by the line "Healthcare in N.Novgorod: hospitals, treatment centers, pharmacies, etc."[2], while the home page presented itself under the heading "Medical CATALOG of N.Novgorod: hospitals, pharmacies, medical centers, etc."[1]. At the bottom of the home page stood the mark "© 2001," and the web archive's snapshots span the period from March 2001 to April 2003[1].

What the site looked like

The content core was a list of the city's medical institutions, divided into six sections: "Hospitals, medical and treatment centers," "Pharmacies," "Cosmetology, beauty salons, cosmetic offices," "Dental centers," "Opticians, vision correction centers," and "Other services"[1]. The same categories were duplicated in the left-hand menu under the heading "Medicine in N.Novgorod," next to which was an item "Registration on the site" — institutions and firms could add themselves to the catalog[1].

Besides the directory section, the home page featured two columns. The "Worth Noting" block reprinted short medical news items — for instance, that British doctors had put a painkiller into a nasal spray, and that "optimists' brains work differently than pessimists'," as the home page reported[1]. The "Useful" and "Interesting" sections linked to outside topical resources: "Psychological Help — Resources on psychotherapy and counseling," "Pharmaceutics — Prices for medicines, medical products, medical equipment," "Your Health," "Pohudenie.ru [Weight Loss]," "Web Doctor" — "a hypertext database of common diseases," as the home page described it[1]. A separate item on the home page was the "Counters" block, a familiar feature of home pages of that era[1].

The snapshot does not say who ran the catalog: there is no owner's name, postal address, or phone number on the home page[1]. The Nizhny Novgorod connection rests on the subject of the site itself and on its place in local directories: the reference guide consisted of addresses of city institutions and was registered in the rubricator of the Nizhny Novgorod counter[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site had a Counter.nn.ru counter numbered 1589, through which the catalog fell into two categories of the Nizhny Novgorod rubricator at once — "Directories and search engines: Address and phone directories" and "Directories and search engines: Internet catalogs"[2][4]. In the directory category, out of fourteen sites it stood in the middle of the list: on June 3, 2002, the "Medical CATALOG's" rating was 8.59, against 19.11 for "Nizhegorodskaya Spravochnaya [Nizhny Novgorod Directory]," 15.8 for "Dzerzhinsk Yellow Pages," and 2 for "Phone Directory on CD"[2].

In the summer of 2002 the value was the highest among those preserved in the available samples: on June 20 the rubricator showed a rating of 65[3], and on August 3 — 47[4]. Then a decline began: by September 24, 2003, in the same "Internet catalogs" category the site's value had fallen to 1[5]. For more on how this rating works and what it reveals, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

In the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the site does not appear[6]: by December 2004 the last saved snapshot of the home page was already more than a year and a half old[1].

How it closed

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated April 5, 2003; the archive preserved six accesses to the address in total, of which the one with text is the snapshot from February 15, 2003[1]. For another six months after that the link to the catalog remained in the counter's rubricator, but already with a near-zero rating[5]. According to our check, the address medicinenn.boom.ru no longer exists today, and our materials contain no information about the catalog moving to another domain.

A fate typical of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that era: a topical directory lives exactly as long as someone keeps updating it, and disappears without any announcement of closure, leaving behind neither an archive of collected addresses nor a successor. From the "Medical CATALOG of N.Novgorod" one snapshot of the home page and four lines in the counter's rubricator have survived.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rubricator, "Address and phone directories," June 3, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rubricator, "Address and phone directories," June 20, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rubricator, "Internet catalogs," August 3, 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rubricator, "Internet catalogs," September 24, 2003 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)