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 across more than a thousand mailing lists (NANOG, the TCP-IP list, Internet-History, Interesting-People, the regional NOGs, 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.