ngma.sci-nnov.ru — the website of NGMA Publishing House (Izdatelstvo NGMA), the publishing house of the Nizhny Novgorod State Medical Academy, which operated from 1999 to 2004. The publishing house was based in Nizhny Novgorod, at 1 Alekseyevskaya Street[1], and issued books on medical subjects and the quarterly scientific and practical “Nizhny Novgorod Medical Journal”[1]. At the foot of the home page stood a double copyright line — “NGMA Publishing House” and “Nizhny Novgorod State Medical Academy”[1].
What the site looked like
The surviving snapshots show a business-card home page with the heading “NGMA Publishing House”, a link to the English version and two blocks of text — “Brief information” and “We invite you to cooperate”[1].
In the first block the publishing house presented itself as “one of the largest Russian publishers producing literature on medical subjects” — so the home page stated — and noted that every year it issued several dozen books on therapeutic and orthopedic dentistry, internal medicine and surgery, pediatrics, neurology, psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology[1]. Two book series were named — “The Doctor’s Pocket Handbook” and “To Aid the Practicing Doctor”[1].
The second block was a list of business offers. Readers were invited into the publisher’s own online shop, which in the 2001 snapshot is named “Nizhegorodskaya Meditsinskaya Kniga” (Nizhny Novgorod Medical Book)[1]. Organizations and authors of manuscripts were offered the publication of educational and academic literature: the page promised editors specializing in medical literature and “its own printing facilities”, making it possible to “carry out any volume of printing accurately, to a high standard and on time”[1]. There was a separate invitation to speak out in the pages of the “Nizhny Novgorod Medical Journal”, offers of wholesale purchase and exchange of book stock, of work as an agent for retail sales on a contractual basis, and of advertising for pharmaceutical firms and manufacturers of medical equipment in the pages and on the covers of its publications[1]. Two links from the home page posted the “price list for books” and the “annotations for books” — in the snapshot of 2 March 2001 these referred to the first quarter of 2001[1].
The page gave the contact details in full: the publishing house’s address — Russia, Nizhny Novgorod, 1 Alekseyevskaya Street; postal address — 603005, Nizhny Novgorod, PO Box 149; telephones (8312) 37-24-32 and 30-87-09; faxes (8312) 30-87-09 and 39-09-43; email kniga@ngma.sci-nnov.ru[1].
What had changed by 2004
The snapshots of 18 March[2] and 28 July 2004[3] match each other and reproduce the 2001 text almost word for word. There are three differences from the 2001 snapshot: the online shop lost its own name, an invitation appeared to subscribe to a mailing list about new books and journals, and a publisher’s news section was added[2][3]. At the same time, the price list and the annotations in both 2004 snapshots are marked as belonging to the second quarter of 2001[2][3] — that is, the commercial part of the site went without updating for roughly the last three years of its existence.
Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
In our inventory of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet the site is recorded in the general top list of the Counter.nn.ru rating for 2000 with a score of 2.42; a year-by-year analysis of the rating and the placing of other sites are given in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. In the surviving voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004 the site does not appear[4], and the inventory credits it with no votes. In its structure this was not an editorial platform with regularly updated content but an organization’s business-card page, which found its way into the general counter on an equal footing with the rest of the local web: the snapshots show neither material from the journal nor the texts of books.
How it closed
The earliest record of the address in the web archive is dated 17 January 1999; no readable text from it has survived in our material. In all, the archive holds 28 captures of the address, the last of them on 29 July 2004; after that the snapshots cease, and in the inventory the address is marked as dead. No successor or move is recorded for it, and a probe found no live page at the address. What became of the publishing house itself after 2004 is not stated by the available materials: the site simply stopped appearing in the archive.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page of ngma.sci-nnov.ru, 2 March 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page of ngma.sci-nnov.ru, 18 March 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page of ngma.sci-nnov.ru, 28 July 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)