Daily Discussion

 Hyperlinks and Development of World Wide Web

Vannevar Bush, one of the Roosevelt’s advisers in the World War II is generally
credited with being the first thinker to suggest mechanical and electronic means to
handle information. In his seminal article published in the “Atlantic Monthly” in
1945, Bush conceptualized Memory Extender called “MemEx”, a thinking machine in
which an individual could store information and link them. However, given the
developments in digital technology at that period, the MemEx was essentially
proposed to be an analogue machine that could be used for information storage on
microfilms with a mechanical linking processe.

Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based “MemEx”, in turn, inspired Ted Nelson and
Douglas Engelbart to carry forward the underlying concept behind MemEx. In 1962,
Engelbart started work on the Augment Project, which aimed to produce tools to aid
human capabilities and productivity. He developed NLS (oN-Line System) that
allowed researchers in Augment Project to access all stored working papers in a
shared “journal” which eventually had 100,000 items in it, and was one of the largest

early digital libraries. Engelbart is also responsible for inventing pointing device
(mouse) in 1968. Ted Nelson designed “Xanadu System” in 1965 and coined the
word “Hypertext” and proposed a system wherein all publications in the world would
be deeply inter-linked. Nelson also tackled the problems of copyrights and payments
by proposing that there should be electronic copyright management system to keep
track of accessing information and for charging it.
The most significant development in the history of Internet was the invention of
World Wide Web (WWW) by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN Laboratory in 1991.
The crucial underlying concept behind World Wide Web (WWW) is hypertext that
has its origin inTed Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line
System (NLS). Berners-Lee, in his book titled “Weaving the Web”, explained that he
had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his suggestion,he finally took-up the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies (Wikipedia, 2014), i.e.
i) a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere,
the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as uniform resource locator
(URL) and uniform resource identifier (URI);
ii) Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); and
iii) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The first electronic resources, in true sense, appeared in the form of bibliographic
records in libraries. Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC), introduced in 1964, can
be considered as a major development in this regard. Soon after, automation of
libraries started in a big way in the 1970s with the introduction of integrated library
automation packages. The trend picked-up in the early 1980s with the introduction of
PCs at a cost affordable to the libraries. The computerized catalogues of individual
libraries led to formation of union catalogues through library networks like OCLC
that were developed to facilitate online and copy cataloguing and resource sharing. By early 1970s, library OPACs and union databases were accessible from remote
locations. Moreover, online search services, like DIALOG, ORBIT, BRS Search and
Datastar in USA; BLAISE and Pergamon Infoline in UK; DIMDI in Germany;
Euronet and Diane in Europe; ESA-IRS in Italy; and CAN/OLE in Canada, etc. were
also made accessible online to the research community. Appearance of bibliographic
and full-text databases on CD ROM by late 1980s can be considered as a major
breakthrough in the evolution of electronic resources. Most of the bibliographic
databases that were accessible through the online search services like DIALOG and
STN became available on CD ROM (Arora, 2007).
The emergence of Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) in early 1990s, as a
new media of information storage and delivery, came as a real boon for evolution of
electronic resources. While searching bibliographic databases became popular, it
created demand for actual content in full-text that became difficult for libraries to
obtain. Coincided with evolution of World Wide Web (WWW), display technology
evolved, cost of storage came down drastically and networks became faster. It became possible for publishers to deliver content, either as a bitmap page images or other structured formats such as HTML, PDF or RTF. Increasingly larger number of publishers started using the Internet as a global way to offer their publications to the international community of scientists and technologists given the fact that technology is in a position to deliver more content to more users at a significantly lower cost per user. These new technologies are continuously driving the electronic resources to new peaks of usage, significantly beyond the library’s subscribed content. These Internet and web technologies brought in the graphical components in electronic resources and digital libraries that were missing earlier.
There has, thus, been a steady move up the technological scale for the electronic
resources from early (late 1980s) low-end electronic publications available as ASCII
files, to being organized and searchable on gophers (1992), and to being tagged and graphically viewable on World Wide Web sites (1994).