bc.r52.ru — the website of the Nizhny Novgorod Business College (in later snapshots, NOU SPO "Nizhny Novgorod Business College"), a non-state institution of secondary vocational education in Nizhny Novgorod. By its own statement on the home page, the college was founded in 1992[1] and was located at 603159, Nizhny Novgorod, 18 Proletarskaya Street[3]. The site lived on a third-level domain in the r52.ru zone: the earliest web archive snapshot is dated 8 March 2001 and carries the copyright line "2000 Business College"[1], while the latest snapshots belong to 2022[6].

The early version: 2001

The 2001 home page was solid running text about the college. The college presented itself as training specialists with secondary specialized vocational education in the fields of "commerce" and "marketing", with a direct note that "tuition is charged"[1]. The same page listed its documents: licence B4924466 of 12 April 1998, certificate of state attestation No. 1719 from the State Inspectorate of Educational Institutions of Russia, and certificate of accreditation No. 25-30 from the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation[1].

The page described the teaching method in detail: the "Scottish modular teaching method", intensive methods of foreign-language study, and computer training running through the whole course, with computer science, a two-week practicum and a business game simulating the operation of an enterprise. Term papers and diploma projects, the page reported, were carried out "on the material of working firms, including on their commission"[1]. The staff was listed as 36 teachers, six of them candidates of sciences; the facilities were described as 14 classrooms, a lecture hall and a gymnasium, a computer room of 17 computers joined into two local networks, a library and a medical room[1]. The extracurricular programme included ballroom dancing, visits to theatres, to the city's museums and to exhibitions at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, and trips to Diveyevo, Makaryev, Suzdal, Murom and Boldino[1]. The line at the bottom of the page named the contractor: "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1].

The 2007 snapshot: two editions in one piece of code

By 2007 the code of the home page held two descriptions of the college one after the other — an old one and a new one; the old one broke off with a closing HTML comment, "-->"[2]. In the old set the specialities had grown to three: COMMERCE (qualification "merchant"), MARKETING ("marketing specialist") and TOURISM ("tourism organizer"), with the length of full-time fee-paying study given as 2 years 10 months on the basis of nine years of schooling and 1 year 10 months on the basis of eleven, and with the entrance examinations: oral mathematics and a Russian-language dictation for those coming from the ninth grade, mathematics alone for those coming from the eleventh[2]. The same place named licence B 493941 of 19 March 2001 and certificate of accreditation No. 25-0730 of 7 December 1999, while the number of teachers had risen to 50[2]. That same block named the business game "Delta" and the "PC User" certificate that students received after the two-week computer practicum, and listed the city's higher-education institutions where the college's graduates went on to study, entering directly into the third year: Lobachevsky University, the Nizhny Novgorod Commercial Institute, the Water Academy, the Construction Academy, and the Higher School of Economics[2].

The second block was already in the name of "NOU SPO Nizhny Novgorod Business College" and rested on more recent documents: licence A 122480 of 17 May 2004 and certificate SP No. 004150 of 28 October 2004, issued after accreditation by the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science[2]. This version spoke of roughly 40 teachers, 30 % of them staff of higher-education institutions, of intensive methods of foreign-language study using Longman and Oxford textbooks, and of laboratory and practical work in the specialist subjects carried out in 1C:Enterprise and Mathcad[2]. A shaping (fitness) hall, a coursework design room, an electronic library and a snack bar had been added to the facilities[2]. At the bottom of the page stood the banner "Union of Educational Websites"[2].

The second site: the 2010s

By 2011 the site had been rebuilt as a multi-section one: the header carried the address, the telephone and fax number (831) 247-30-03 and an email address protected against spam bots, while the menu consisted of the sections "Home", "College", "For Students", "For Applicants", "For Parents", "Photos" and "Contacts"[3]. The home page carried the blocks "Graduates on the College", "Advantages of Studying at the College", "Gallery of Success" and "A Word from the Director"; the director was named as Natalya Ivanovna Yemelyanova, and the college, according to the text of the page, had by then trained "more than 1,000 specialists"[3]. A news feed was running: on 2 November 2010, about changes in the opening hours of the college library; on 6 January 2011, a New Year greeting and a report on taking part in the ROST competition of youth innovation teams[3]. The footer bore the copyright line "Nizhny Novgorod Business College (c) 2010" and the line "Website creation: AyTi Grup (IT Group) company"[3]. Unfilled English-language template items, switched off by a comment, remained in the page code: Home, Tutorials, Sub Nav Link, Resources, About Us, Advertise, Submit, Contact Us[3].

The snapshot of 7 October 2014 shows the same design, but with signs of a halt: in "A Word from the Director" a stray character ":/" had appeared before the text, the director was now given as Nadezhda Mikhailovna Levina, and the freshest news items were dated 2013 — "Enrolment order" and "Timetable for 2 September" of 30 August, and "The college's official website" of 23 September[4]. In this snapshot the copyright in the footer read "2010-2011"[4].

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet, and the closure

The site entered our census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet through the classifier of the nn.ru directory, where it was described in a single line — "Training in commerce and marketing". It appears neither in the collected data of the Counter.nn.ru rating nor among the participants in the vote for Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day (more on the method of selection in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).

About eighty snapshots of the site accumulated in the web archive index over two decades[6]. Substantive updates ceased after 2013, and the snapshot of 28 March 2022 has survived in damaged form — it no longer contains any readable text[5]. The archive's last visit to the site is dated 5 October 2022[6]. By the time the census was compiled the domain was already gone: bc.r52.ru does not respond and does not resolve in the domain name system.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — List of bc.r52.ru snapshots in the web archive (archive)