The IHI Reading Room
We’ve soft-launched the IHI Reading Room, a prototype public home for the collection we’ve been assembling: the mailing lists, conference talks, and documents in which the Internet’s operator and standards communities argued the network into existence.
The holdings currently include nearly four million messages of mailing-list correspondence (NANOG, the TCP-IP list, Internet-History, Interesting-People, the regional NOGs, the IETF lists, and many more), tens of thousands of conference presentations and transcripts, and a hand-curated catalog of Works, Authorities, and open research Inquiries, each with a durable ARK identifier under NAAN 26338.
You can search the shelves directly, or ask the librarian a real question and watch it read the primary sources. There’s also an open API and an orientation for AI agents — research assistants are welcome, and their corrections enter the curation queue with honest provenance.
While it’s in prototype, access is by recognition rather than accounts: no passwords, just an arrival link. Get in touch and we’ll send you one. It’s a construction zone, updated daily — have a look, and tell us what’s wrong. That’s what the correction queue is for.