nonmb.unn.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Scientific Medical Library, operating on a third-level address in the unn.ru zone. The earliest of our surviving snapshots of the home page is dated 14 February 2003[1], and the latest — 22 May 2007[4]. In every snapshot the home page promises the same things: a Z39.50 gateway, information about medical literature from the library's holdings, and full-text documents[2]. From August 2003 the page carried a line about support from the Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation)[2].

Home page

The home page was set up as a short landing page: the library's name, two sentences about its content, and contact addresses. As the home page put it, "You can connect to the Z39.50 gateway on our site," and further: "You can also get information about the medical literature on our shelves and read full-text documents, which are updated every day" (spelling of the original preserved)[2]. Z39.50 is a standard protocol for querying library catalogs: the gateway allows the catalog to be accessed from third-party programs as well.

From there a link labeled "Enter the site..." led the user onward[2]. The home page gave no library address, phone number, or opening hours: for contact it provided only email — library@nonmb.unn.ru for general inquiries and a separate address for the site administrator[3].

How the page changed

The February 2003 snapshot shows the earliest version: the heading "Nizhny Novgorod Regional Scientific Medical Library," a description of the resources, and a single email address — library@nonmb.unn.ru[1]. By August 2003 the page had gained the link "Enter the site...", the administrator address druxa@nonmb.unn.ru, and the line about support from the Open Society Institute[2].

By November 2004 the administrator address had changed to the depersonalized admin@nonmb.unn.ru, and a "guest book" was added — as the home page put it, "for your feedback and suggestions"[3]. After that the home page did not change: the May 2007 snapshot repeats the 2004 version word for word[4].

The domain in the nn.ru directory

In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, the library's domain turned up in an unexpected way. In the nn.ru site directory (a snapshot from July 2003), the entry for this domain sat in the "Projects: Music" category — under the title "Download Music" and with the description "You can download music in Nizhny Novgorod here!" The link led not to the home page but to an internal page, http://nonmb.unn.ru/mo-do[5]. It appears that an unrelated music page was hosted on the library's server, and it was that page — not the library's own resource — that ended up in the directory; we have no snapshots of it.

The same entry also carried a Counter.nn.ru rating — "Rating: 202" — with a link to the counter card numbered 11085[5]. Against its neighbors in the category, this stood out: of the category's 25 entries, 19 had "none" in the rating column, and only one site ranked above 202 — "District of My Dream," with a rating of 377[5]. The case illustrates the method behind the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating: a directory entry describes not necessarily an entire site, but a specific address that its page's owner once registered.

In the surviving results table for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote (a snapshot from December 2004), the domain nonmb.unn.ru does not appear[6] — either the library was not entered in the site contest, or it did not make it into the table.

What became of the site

The last surviving snapshot of the home page we have is dated 22 May 2007 and is no different from the version two and a half years earlier[4]: no news, no signs of a site overhaul. Today the address nonmb.unn.ru does not respond — in our census of defunct Nizhny Novgorod sites it is marked as no longer existing. Where the library's electronic resources moved to, the archived snapshots do not say.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, February 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, August 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, «Projects: Music» category, 2003 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)