In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee introduced his project at CERN, which later was identified as the “World Wide Web”. In 1991 he created the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, and in the same year he publicly announced it in the Usenet newsgroup “alt.hypertext”. The World Wide Web, after a slow start [Frana 2004], rapidly reached more than 16 million users[6], who were, already in 1995, the creators of a great amount of born digital traces. However, the first project that focused on the preservation of this new kind of information started only at the end of 1996 under the leadership of Brewster Kahle. His utopian purpose was to archive the web in its entirety [Kahle 1997]. The project he presented under the name of “Internet Archive” has become, during the last two decades, a fundamental archival resource for the preservation of our digital past. Its crawlers started acquiring and preserving snapshots of web pages in November 1996, performing an ever-increasing uphill climb with the never-ending growth and continuous change of the web. In 2001, the Internet Archive introduced the Wayback Machine, the platform that permits the displaying and browsing (through a URL search tool) of the results of the crawl.

During the last twenty years, several other platforms, often inspired by the ideas behind the Internet Archive but with a more specific national focus, have been developed, such as Pandora in Australia (1996), the UK Web Archive (2004), Netarkivet in Denmark (2005) and the Portuguese Web Archive (2007). Moreover, in 2003, the Internet International Preservation Consortium (IIPC) was founded at the National Library of France[7] which, during the last decade, has coordinated national and international efforts to preserve Internet contents for the future. Today, with a General Assembly meeting every year since 2011 and organizations joining from 25 different countries, the IIPC has become the leading guide of these born-digital preservation projects.

There are two different ways of considering web archive materials as primary sources in historical studies. The first, described for example by Brügger [Brügger 2012a], has its roots in the fields of media and Internet studies and aims at examining the web of the past by contextualizing and understanding changes in layout, structure, content and use. In 2010, Brügger edited the first book on the topic, and the title of the volume, Web History, clearly highlighted the research topic of the community [Brügger 2010]. A similar focus emerges upon reading the objectives of a new journal titled Internet Histories, recently launched by Niels Brügger and others.[11]

The second way of considering these materials as primary sources has, instead, a wider spectrum of applications. As already remarked by Roy Rosenzweig [Rosenzweig 2003], born digital materials (with their scarcity and abundance) will have an impact on the entire historical profession; for this reason, web archive materials could soon become new sources for political as well as social, cultural and economic historians. Recent works, such as the studies conducted by Anat Ben David [Ben-David 2016] and Sophie Gebeil [Gebeil 2016] already show how topics such as the Yugoslav conflict and North African immigration in France could be studied fruitfully from a web archive perspective.

In both areas, researchers have explored the potential of computational methods, such as text mining and network analyses, for extracting information from large web archive collections. Examples are presented in Milligan [Milligan 2012], [Milligan 2017], Hale et al. [Hale 2014] and Holzmannet al. [Holzmann 2016].

While higher education has been a fundamental component of every advanced civilization, only in medieval Europe arose a new type of public institution of learning, which is now defined as “university” [Perkin 2007]. Considering this type of institution as a political, economic and social actor initially has attracted the interest of historians, who wanted to understand how its power, role and influence changed over time, especially in relation to other actors, such as the city, the church, the national government (e.g. [Bowosky 1973];[Clark 1976]). The massive four-volume book series A History of the Universities in Europe, commissioned by the European University Association, edited by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Rüegg and published between 1992 and 2011, offers an unprecedented comprehensive overview of how universities have changed what they have taught and researched, how they have been institutionalized and how they have interacted with the society. In these studies, researchers adopt a large variety of primary and secondary sources, from university-archived materials such as matriculation and graduation statistics [Brockliss 1978];[Macleod 1978] to scientific publications [Richardson 1999], from public reports [de Wied 1991] to the results of large-scale statistical analyses [Finkenstaedt 2011]. Based on these data, scholars have described and drawn conclusions on the recent history of universities on a large variety of topics, such as the way universities have managed resources, the way the admission processes have changed before and after 1970, and how the major branches of knowledge have been taught and studied.

While universities have been largely examined as institutions that change and evolve in relation to each other and are conditioned by (while also conditioning) political and economic powers, they are also the physical place where scientists and humanities scholars conduct their work. For this reason, academic institutions have also been examined by historians of science and technology, interested in understanding how STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) have been taught and studied in universities [Fox 1993], how scientific knowledge has moved back and forth between universities and the private sector [Mahoney 1988];[Guagnini 1988], how political, economic and social actors have influenced scientific research in academia [Pancaldi 2006] and how scientists work in their laboratories [Worboys 2011].

Another perspective on universities and their recent past is offered through the scientometrics discipline, whose goal is to measure and analyze the impact of publications, journals and institutes, and to produce indicators that would be adopted in policy and management contexts. The use of metrics such as citation and co-citation measures [Van Raan 1997] has attracted a lot of attention from university administrations, politicians, sociologists and quantitative historians (for further discussion, see [De Bellis 2009]); additionally, the quantification of the scientific output as a measure of evaluating and comparing academic institutions has had a huge impact on their recent past, influencing hiring strategies as well as the pursuit of certain research topics and practices. In addition to bibliometric measures, more recently, a series of publications has focused on the use of word-based and topic-based approaches in order to conduct scientometrics studies (see [Lu 2012]). These contributions have expanded the type of materials that could be analyzed (e.g. not just research papers, but also the content of grant proposal or awards as in [Nichols 2014]), the methods at disposal of the research community and the points of view that can be employed.

The website of the University of Bologna is currently offered in two different linguistic versions: an Italian (which is available at the URL: http://www.unibo.it/it), and an English one. Moreover, as the university has five campuses, the website is consequently divided into five subsections (for example, http://www.unibo.it/it/campus-forli). As the English version offers the translation of only a part of the website, the focus of this research will be mainly on the Italian version.

This website (see Figure 1) is currently managed by two different offices: “CeSIA - SettoreTecnologie web” that takes care of the structure (called “Sistema Portale di Ateneo”), and “AAGG — UfficioPortale Internet e Intranet di Ateneo”[20] that manages the content. If we consider its subsections, such as “Didattica” (educational information) and “Ricerca” (research), its sub-domains, such as the “Unibo Magazine”, and retrieve current and old abandoned department web pages[21], we can obtain an initial overview of the current status and structure of the website. This allows us to notice that large pieces of information published online by the university between the early 2000s and 2015 are still available online (for example all the course programs, the descriptions of research projects and the contracts and grants published by each School). However, in order to retrieve them, a very basic “string-matching” search tool[22] is the only tool promptly available.

To understand why most of the materials from the early 2000s is still available online, while resources from the 90s seem way more difficult to retrieve, I contacted the people who have been involved with the management of the website during the last fifteen years.

Luca Garlaschelli was the Chief of the Information/Innovation Office (CIO) at the University of Bologna between 2002 and 2012. Under his supervision the “Sistema Portale di Ateneo” was created. This is a general interface to a hierarchical organization of all the digital resources of the university that are available online, with a specific focus on enhancing the accessibility of the information at disposal[23]. As it will be presented in the next pages, this has led to a revolutionary transformation of the digital presence of the institution, which made Unibo.it a reference point for all other Italian university websites. As a matter of fact, for three consecutive years Unibo.it received the “Osc@r del web” prize as the best Italian public administration website[24].

Among several improvements of the website, this transformation required that all departments and web pages which provided information on the various degree programs change their structure and adopt a common layout and organization of their content. As an example, the Department of Classic and Medieval Philology and the Department of Computer Science had to change their URL addresses to standardized ones (“abbreviation of the name of the department” + “unibo.it”). Thus, the first one changed from: http://www.classics.unibo.it/ to http://www.ficlit.unibo.it/ and the second one from http://www.cs.unibo.it/ to http://www.informatica.unibo.it/. This transition started in 2004 and often required the creation of completely new department pages. A few departments decided to keep the older version of their sub-domains online by adding a “2” after the “www”[25] (as an example, the previously mentioned http://www2.classics.unibo.it/), while the majority simply removed the old versions of their page from the live web, for example the Department of History, whose URL was: http://www.dds.unibo.it/.

As previously described, it is still possible to retrieve a sub-domain of the University of Bologna website (such as a department page) on the Internet Archive, but only if the original URL is known, which is not a trivial issue (as described in [Nanni 2015];[Ben-David 2016]). For example, the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies were two different departments until 2012 and the Department of Philosophy used http://www.filosofia.unibo.it as a URL even before the transition to the “Sistema Portale d’Ateneo”. However, in the 90s, this department used another URL for a couple of years, http://www.sofia.philo.unibo.it which, without the memories of the people who managed the sub-section at that time, would have been be very difficult to discover.

In summary, we can identify a specific turning point in the history of the University of Bologna website. With the “Sistema Portale d’Ateneo” project and in particular with the standardization of departments pages which started in 2004[26], the website has been completely re-organized and the majority of the previous content on these pages has been deleted from the live web. However, if they have maintained the same URL or if the previous URL is known[27], the subdomain materials and their structure can be retrieved from the Internet Archive.

Mauro Amico, head of the web-technologies department at CeSIA, offered a collection of seven .png images (see Appendix) that capture the most important instances in the evolution of the organization of the homepage before the current layout (1996 – 2013)[28]. This was important as a starting point for understanding how the website structure and layout changed during the years. Looking at the snapshots after 2002 we can observe that, even if a few graphical adjustments were made (the Unibo-Magazine was introduced on the left in 2004; the search tool was repositioned in the center in 2006, etc.), the structure remained more or less the same until the July 2013, when the current interface was presented. The present organization of the “Sistema Portale d’Ateneo” is the first one to be completely created by CeSIA without the supervision of Luca Garlaschelli and, along with a new graphic interface, its main characteristic is the fact that it offers for the first time the possibility of surfing the website as a specific user (a prospective student, a student, a private company, etc.) and it proposes different contents accordingly, thereby allowing better optimization and personalization of the website.

Even if these .png images give us a first idea of the different interfaces, to be able to explore again the old versions of the website, other services have to be employed. As a start, the Internet Memory Foundation offers the results of the 2006 national “.it” crawl online, but only a single snapshot of Unibo.it homepage is available (archived on the 8th of May 2006[29]) and that is not even completely preserved. As previously noted, other national web archives could have captured, from time to time, parts of the Italian web sphere. Among them, it was discovered that both the Portuguese (Arquivo) and Danish (Netarkivet) web archives have preserved parts of Unibo.it several times from 2006. These snapshots (example in Figure 2) permit us, for the first time, to explore and examine the differences in structure and content of the previous versions of the “Sistema Portale”.

The use of primary sources from the digital archive of the newspaper La Repubblica has been of significant help in this study. As a matter of fact, these articles present an overview of the interactions between the university and its community, as well as insights on the key role of the website as an intermediary. It has been found, for example, that in 2003 the university introduced, on its website, the digital edition of the student-guide of the city of Bologna, as also described in a news in the Unibo Magazine[30]. The guide was written by Umberto Eco, Carlo Lucarelli and other renowned professors and writers. This document provides a list of useful digital resources for new students, i.e. the platform “Flash Giovani”, created with the support of the municipality of Bologna and focused on the cultural activities in the city and the website “Studenti.it” which has, in the last fifteen years, become one the most important Italian online communities for high school and university students[31].

As described in the Unibo Magazine[32], since 2004 each professor has had a personal page, in which they publish course programs (and all additional materials, such as slides), their research interests and publications list[33]. Digital sources relating to the recent years of the university also allow us to discover how in 2005 the future “Prorettore per la ricerca” Dario Braga underlined the importance of starting to teach courses in English (and also Chinese and Arabic) among his “proposals for the future”[34] or how five years later, during his administration, he actively discussed[35] in a Google Group newsletter the impact of the “Gelmini” school reform with a group of professors who were collectively termed as “Docenti preoccupati” (“worried professors”)[36]. Moreover, these materials gave us insight into the activities of the “Centro Studi La Permanenza del Classico” whose director was the former Rector, Ivano Dionigi[37] and showed how the Unibo Magazine presented itself online in 2003 (with an interview[38] of the then Rector, Pier Ugo Calzolari, who spoke the scarcity of funding for higher education and research in Italy).

Among all these different resources, one source deserves special mention. In May 2007, a group of activists decided to create a copy of the Unibo.it interface. They were demonstrating against the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) for the evaluation of the number of hours of study. They believed that the university website could be the perfect target for their protest, in order to attract the attention of the institution. At the URL http://www.unibologna.eu/ an identical version of the homepage was available, with the description of the reasons of the protest. In a couple of weeks, the website attracted a high number of visitors and most of all the attention of the university[39], which blocked the access to it from all its computers[40]. This source is not only important in our study as it documents a different and innovative way of conducting a protest against an academic institution[41], but as the fake-website has been preserved by the Internet Archive it also paradoxically offers a preserved version of Unibo.it, so that we can browse and study (see Figure 3).

In order to study the structure of the website before the “Sistema Portale d’Ateneo” several different sources have been employed, which will in turn help us in understanding what the website looked like, how it was used and how relevant it was in the academic digital “ecosystem”.

In particular, as described earlier, the archive of the newspaper La Repubblica offers important information on how the website changed during the 90s. For example, it was discovered that the institution offered a free email account to all students from 2002[42] and it was the first Italian university which gave the possibility of paying fees online (2000)[43]; moreover since 1999 some departments also guaranteed the possibility of enrolling for courses and exams online[44]. Another interesting piece of news retrieved from the digital archive of La Repubblica is from October 2001, a few months before the project “Portale d’Ateneo” started. In those days, the University of Bologna website won the “WWW” prize from the Italian economic newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore for the best website in the category “School, university and research”. At the ceremony Salvatore Mirabella, a technician who managed the website during the 90s, was also present[45]. However, as we can notice by looking at the images offered by CeSIA or by analyzing a few examples that are still available on the live web (i.e. http://www2.unibo.it/annuari)[46], before the “Sistema Portale d’Ateneo” project the homepage of Unibo.it was mainly an information page, presenting only a few links (see Figure 4).

At the same time, consulting “The list and map of the Italian WWW servers”[47] created by Cilea and available from 1997 onwards on the Internet Archive[48], we can observe that several departments, faculties and research groups were already online and, as opposed to the relatively passive homepage, very active in the 90s. For example, we can retrieve all the information on courses in history since 1998[49], the organization of the university astronomical observatory[50] and of the Faculty of Engineering[51] since 1997, description on the inter-faculty library since October 1996[52] (the entire system was created in 1993[53]), the digitization of the students guide books carried out by the faculty of economics in 1994[54]. The Internet Archive has also preserved Unibo.it’s old online magazine, AlmaNews, which offer several short videos of important events, such as the ceremony[55] for the first degrees in Business Administration and Political Sciences in 1997. These different pages, extremely useful for prospective and enrolled students[56], were continuously updated with new information by technicians, researchers, professors and, from time to time, also with contributions of students[57]. For these reasons, they all evolved differently during the 90s and they are now interesting instances on how the departments of this university approached the World Wide Web.

In addition to examining departmental pages, there are many other ways of looking at the second half of the 90s’ history of Unibo.it. We could follow the information related to AlmaNET, the university internal Internet connection, which in 1988 was established to connect three departments and was highly improved in 1996[58], thanks to the collaboration of Telecom Italia and under the supervision of CeSIA (which was created in 1994)[59]. Another perspective on the recent past of this institution could be developed by the examination of the impact of the online service AlmaLaurea, presented in May 1998[60], which aimed at improving the relationship between the institution, its student community and the job-market. A third point of view might be focused on the relation and mutual influence between the university and the municipality, by considering the role played by the Internet. In fact, the city of Bologna and its citizens have a strong bond with innovation in computing technologies, with the municipality for instance having created one of the first civic-networks in the world in 1995, giving to all citizens free access to the Internet the very next year [Chiara 1998]. The early importance of the web for Bologna citizens appeared also in a 1996 article retrieved from La Repubblica digital archive. As mentioned in the piece of news [Venturi 1996], in November of that year for the first time in Italy, a digital discussion was censored and an entire mailing list named “Lisa” was completely closed. This happened on the Unibo server[61]: CeSIA informed the professor of computer science Dario Maio of the presence of violent debates on the platform and the Department of Computer Science decided to drastically intervene. As the article reported, these digital conflicts were probably related to the internal discussion of an Italian association named “La città invisibile”[62] (“The invisible city”). This association, comprising early Internet activists, was interested in sharing the importance of digital cultures and rights. Among them there were also academics, for example Lucio Picci (currently professor of Political Economy[63]), who was at that time a young researcher at the University of Bologna[64].

It is evident that diachronically examining the digital alter ego of the institution and using these resources to extend our knowledge on its recent past is a complex challenge, which relies on both an interdisciplinary set of methodological approaches and specific research questions. The examples presented above only highlight some specific perspectives on the topic, which I have encountered while examining the collected sources. While each one of the aspects previously presented would offer a different insight on the early use of the web by the institution,the last part of this section will focus on a different task: tracing the origin of the university website. This will help us in understanding the process of creation of Unibo.it: who was responsible for it, for what reasons was it created and in which context. Old websites hold interesting stories on their origins, which are often placed at the intersection of academic research, curiosity in advanced digital technologies (together with aspiration of contributing to them) and mutual human desire of communicating with others. Unibo.it is one of them.

Tracing the first online presence of an entity such as the University of Bologna has not been an easy task. In Italy a list of .it servers was initially maintained by the research center CNUCE (Centro Nazionale Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico) and is currently available on the website Registro.it[65]. However all early Italian websites (created before 1996) have a common creation date: 29-01-1996 (Figure 5).

The research group “GARR-Network Information Retrieval” organized a series of annual meetings in the early 90s[67], dedicated to the spread of the World Wide Web in Italy at the university level. Consulting the proceedings of 1994, I learned[68] that Unibo.it was already active at least in the August of the year before. The fact that the university was fostering the use of the Internet and of web materials could be also deduced by consulting the 1993/94 yearbooks, where the importance of AlmaNet is mentioned, as well as the need of adopting emails as a form of communication and online databases as new resources.

During the first years of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee curated a list of web-servers on the CERN website; the last update available is from late 1992[69]. Unibo.it is not mentioned in this list, but there is a link to another Italian research institution, the Physics Institute in Trieste. Later, on the NCSA website, a specific section called “What’s New!” published a list of the new servers on the web each month (from June 1993 to January 1996)[70]. By consulting it, some interesting information about specific sub-sections of Unibo.it was found: for example the “Bologna Astrophysics Preprints” has offered online, since November 1994, all the scientific publications of the Bologna Astronomical Observatory (OAB), the Astronomy Department of Bologna University (DDA), the Radio astronomy Institute of CNR (IRA) and the TESRE Institute of CNR (ITE). However, for what concerns specifically the creation date of the website, in December 1993 a link to a map of all Italian web-servers was published, but this link is not available anymore (it redirects to the 1997 version of the Cilea Map). Summarizing then, by consulting born digital materials as well as traditional archival sources, we know that Unibo.it was already available in the second half of 1993, and that the website was created after the end of 1992, according to the CERN web-server list.

University websites have usually been created by researchers who were already using the Internet in their work. For this reason, departments and research centers in computer science[71] and physics[72] are generally good starting points for discovering who created the website of a specific institution. However, in Bologna, the university website was created in a different place, namely at the Department of Mathematics, thanks to the collaboration between a Turkish professor who had at that time arrived from the United States, and a young Italian researcher.

The story of the origins of Unibo.it emerged in an interview conducted with Renzo Davoli. Davoli is currently professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna; in the early 90s he was working under the supervision of Ozalp Babaoglu, who arrived in Bologna in 1988 from Cornell University and wanted to use the Internet – among other things – to stay in touch with his colleagues and friends from abroad. Given the fact that Bologna did not have a Department of Computer Science at that time, Babaoglu and Davoli were working at the Department of Mathematics. In 1988 the two of them established the second Italian node to the Internet[73], from the Department of Mathematics to CNUCE, in Pisa[74] and Davoli became the person in charge of the University TCP/IP network. They then became part of AlmaNet, the internal network initially established between the Departments of Mathematics, Engineering and Physics. In the following years, AlmaNet played an essential role in connecting university departments, especially the ones located outside the city.

Interactions between the departments were again improved thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web. Departments were the first to be online and, once again, this was accomplished thanks to Babaouglu and Davoli. As a matter of fact, in July 1993, the two researchers registered and created the web pages of the domains “cs.unibo.it” (Computer Science) and “dm.unibo.it” (Department of Mathematics). This helped colleagues in other departments understand the huge potential of the web. Initially, Davoli and Babaoglu managed the main website as well, which then passed under the supervision of the Public Relation Office, and in particular of Salvatore Mirabella[75].

The history of universities has traditionally focused on topics such as the role of academic institutions in processes such as nation building as well as on the influence of governments (through economic and political decisions), on the experience and life of students as well as on the relationship of institutions and professional realities. Another topic that has attracted significant attention is the examination of universities as institutions of higher education, where the manner in which topics are taught and education is provided are also highly influenced by several political, economic and social factors.

Examining what has been taught within a given timeframe at a specific academic institution and understanding the global and local reasons that influenced specific changes is a topic that has attracted the attention of many historians of universities. For example, [de Ridder-Symoens 1992-2011], provides a complete overview of the most recurrent teaching topics in European academic institutions and how and why they have changed in the last centuries. Traditionally, historians collect this information by examining different sources, such as student transcript of lessons and professor’s notes[80] as well as university yearbooks and the reasons behind widespread adoption of specific textbooks. In recent years, Dan Cohen [Cohen 2006]; [Cohen 2011] has considered the large and still unexplored potential that online syllabi could offer to the study of academic teaching. The first digital-historical work on the topic has been published in 2005 in the Journal of American History [Cohen 2005]. The goal of the paper was to show how the teaching of history in U.S. universities is still strongly based on textbooks. These findings, which are directly in contrast to a round table discussion published in the same journal four years prior [Kornblith 2001], were obtained thanks to a large study of around 800 syllabi available on the web.

While Cohen’s work is a first step in this direction, the potential of online syllabi goes beyond his study and could rapidly affect the practices, topics and findings of historians of universities as well as the scientometrics community. During the reconstruction of the past of Unibo.it, it was possible to collect all syllabi published online by the institution, which in the case of the University of Bologna are in the number of thousands for each academic year[81]. This type of documents will further allow to conduct large-scale analyses on what have been, year after year, the topics that the University (and each single school and department) decided to focus on in its educational programs. Results of these studies will be useful for obtaining a wider perspective in a scientometrics setting (by considering both the input and output of an academic institution) and will also act as the starting point for addressing questions regarding the underlying cultural, economic and political factors that condition specific changes.