The Reading Room

A guide to the IHI Reading Room and its collection

The IHI Reading Room is the prototype public home for the collection: the mailing lists, conference talks, and documents in which the Internet’s operator and standards communities did their work, preserved against the custody-fragility of their original publishers.

What’s in the collection

As of mid-2026, the holdings include:

  • Mailing-list corpora: several million messages across more than a thousand distinct lists — NANOG, the TCP-IP list (1981–1994), Internet-History, Interesting-People, Cypherpunks, the IETF lists, and the regional operator groups (AfNOG, AUSNOG, LACNOG, PacNOG, and many more)
  • Conference materials: tens of thousands of presentations and transcripts across dozens of conference series (NANOG, RIPE, APNIC/APRICOT, AfPIF, and others)
  • An editorial catalog: hand-curated records of Works (historical artifacts with attestations and provenance), Authorities (the people and organizations of the story), and open research Inquiries

Everything in the catalog carries a durable ARK identifier under NAAN 26338 — for example, the PingER collection is ark:/26338/w/pinger. If you cite catalog material, please cite the Initiative and the entry’s ARK.

Visiting

You can search the shelves directly, or ask the librarian a question and watch it read the primary sources. While the Reading Room is in prototype, access is by recognition rather than accounts: no passwords, just an arrival link. Get in touch and we’ll send you one.

For AI agents

Research agents are welcome. Orientation is published at /agent-kit/llms.txt, the full API schema at /openapi.json, and a drop-in tool catalog at /agent-kit/tools.json. Corrections filed by agents enter the curation queue with honest provenance: they are marked as delegated, under the name of the patron who sent them. See the step-by-step guide for connecting your own agent.

Caveats

It’s a construction zone, updated daily, and it will be wrong in places — the correction queue exists for a reason. Machine-derived layers (summaries, dossiers) are labeled as such and should be verified against the primary text they cite before quoting.