Projects - The Total Library. American Memory from the Library of Congress - Browse Collection. Home - Library. History of the Virtual Library. See also: About the Virtual Library,Alumni of the Virtual Library. If you are looking for virtual libraries containing resources on history in general. Please visit theHistory page of the central catalogue. This page, here, only deals with the history of The World Wide Web Virtual Library itself.
Introduction The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest catalogue of the Web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and of the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial catalogues, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the Web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the Web. Individual indexes live on hundreds of different servers around the world. The beginning: 1991-92 The archived copies at W3C, linked to above, date from November 3rd 1992. 1997-present Search Engines. Welcome to the John M. Pfau Library.