Imagine typing the name of your town into Google and finding virtually no information about it.
No Wikipedia entry.
No news stories.
No maps.
No weather information.
No "things to do" advice.
No photographs.
No YouTube videos.
Not even links to local government, schools, businesses, or other organizations.
Such was the situation in many mid-sized and small American communities in the mid 1990s, when the Internet was new and most people were just starting to use it.
Here's a story about that early, uncharted territory, and someone named Matthew Kane, head of the Altoona Area Public Library, who decided to do something with it.
In 1994, AAPL received a Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) grant that paid for upgrades to its computer system and enabled staff to access the Internet. The following year, AAPL installed a Internet access station for the public. Along the way, Kane discovered that precious little information about Altoona was available on the web. As he later put it, all he found was "candy wrapper collections" (perhaps related to Boyer Company's Mallo Cup), places to play "paint ball" (a popular recreational sport at the time), and "not too much else." For a city of more than 50,000 residents, this lack of online presence was both a significant problem and a golden opportunity.
So, in Summer 1995, Kane teamed up with Craig Kumar of Altoona Area School District's Center for Advanced Technologies, Peter Nigh of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, and Jay Strawmire of the Altoona/Blair Chamber of Commerce to approach other movers and shakers. Wanting to "make Altoona and Blair County a leader on the Internet," they invited everyone to a meeting to discuss developing a website that would present their community in an "organized, positive way" in the World Wide Web that was emerging.
In some ways, a librarian taking a leadership role in developing a community website was just the latest iteration of a role that libraries had played for decades. Reference departments, which typically embraced information-provision as part of their missions, often subscribed to printed telephone/address directories; maintained vertical files, rolodexes, and other compilations of local data; and willingly provided referrals for those who asked. By convening Altoona colleagues from the cultural, educational, business, government, and health sectors, Kane was simply creating a directory in an exciting new format -- albeit one that was more colorful, expandible, updatable, and interactive than anything he'd probably known before.
It might seem that the dream-team Kane assembled were overthinking things by involving so many people just to produce a website. But this particular historical moment required that. Today, many of us author digital material without much consultation or fanfare; off-the-shelf software makes it easy to create something attractive and functional in no time flat. However, in the mid-1990s, such tools didn't exist. Web authorship involved significant coding skills that most people didn't have. So the involvement of Kumar and CAT was essential to the project's success. By getting Nigh of SPHPC and Strawmire of the Chamber on-board, Kane was involving two of the most civically-active sectors in his region -- its history professionals and business community. Working for a cash-strapped institution, Kane probably hoped that the other entities could help pay for CAT's labors, or, they could collectively achieve some economies of scale. He and his colleagues also believed that their site might be the first and only impression outsiders might get of their city/county, so they all wanted that impression to be a favorable one.
At any rate, nearly 30 representatives from all types of organizations came to an initial meeting on June 16, 1995 --including people from state senator Robert C. Jubelirer's office, Altoona's City Hall and its Planning Department, the Blair County Commissioners' office, various cultural, educational, and human services agencies, the Altoona Mirror newspaper, and WTAJ-TV. They participated in "sharing sessions" about how they were putting local information on the Internet, and they explored potential partnerships and funding streams. Unfortunately the minutes from this particular meeting don't detail which organizations already had their own websites, but judging from information shared at subsequent gatherings, we can conclude that few if any did.
As a result of the June meeting, a "Blair County Internet Partnership Committee" formed and it included:
- Matthew Kane (chair), Altoona Area Public Library
- Catherine Augustine, Center for Advanced Technologies
- Julia Bennett, Blair County Library System
- Cheryl Ebersole, Allegheny Mountains Convention and Visitors Bureau
- Steve Gildea, Mercy Regional Health Systems
- Donna Gority, County of Blair
- Marty Marasco, Altoona Enterprises
- Frank Meloy, Altoona Area School District
- Peter Nigh, Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission
- Toby Sky Rispoli, Penn State Altoona
- Ronald Roefar, Appalachia Intermediate Unit 08
- JoEllen Steinbrunner (originally), later Jean Johnstone and Patrick Miller, Blair County Mental Health/Drugs and Alcohol
- Jay Strawmine, Altoona-Blair County Chamber of Commerce
- Deborah Weakland, Altoona Area Public Library
- Jian Wu, City of Altoona
In subsequent meetings, they reviewed online content from other localities. especially Pittsburgh and York County. They decided that the Altoona-Blair site should have a landing page with links to second-level pages that were categorized as "Business," "Government," "History," "Services," "Education," "Health," "Travel," and "Libraries." Two-person teams were appointed to provide Kane with outlines for second-level material -- including any organizations that should be listed, and further content to be written. CAT would develop the first and second-level pages free of charge and add links to organizations' sites as they emerged. Entities that wanted CAT's assistance for developing their own sites would pay for it through their own budgets.
As of August 1995, some organizations were still in exploratory stages while others were actively collaborating with 3rd parties. For example, SPHPC had reached out to Bell Atlantic about developing a local server, while Altoona City Hall had posted documents to the site of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Pittsburgh office. Of everyone at the meeting, Mercy Hospital seemed to be the furthest along: not only did it have its own site, but it had also created an online training course for nurses. Among the educational organizations, Penn State Altoona was the first in the area to offer "in-depth homepages." However, AAPL and most of the others hadn't mounted their own sites yet.
After committee members turned in their outlines to Kane, website development seems to have taken several months. Over that time, some began referring to the project as "ALTBLA" -- likely because of abbreviations for "Altoona" and "Blair" within the site's URL, though it could also be said that the site provided an "alternative" to the "blather" that the Internet otherwise provided about their area. Either way, the long-awaited unveiling of the ALTBLA homepage on Friday, March 1, 1996, was a red-letter date, hosted in AAPL's theater with State Senator Robert C. Jubelirer as a keynote speaker. Ironically, though, it's difficult to get a sense of what the thing actually looked like. According to a "script" for the event, which still exists in AAPL's Administrative Office files, Kane explained that the design was intended to "reflect the evolution of the area from a primarily railroad region to a region that is embracing computer technology." Referencing Bill Gates's book The Road Ahead, which was a bestseller at the time, Kane described the Internet as a "townsquare" [sic] where people meet, converse, exchange information -- "generally an environment for sharing and learning from one another."
Fortunately, Kane then provided a walk-through of the site, and this provides us a sense of how it functioned. In those early days when few organizations had their own servers or the impetus to register domain names, the Altoona-Blair site had an impossibly complicated URL that reflected its hosting by CAT within the Altoona Area School District:
http://cat99.altoona.k12.pa.us/altoonablair/ALTBLA.htm
After sharing this mouthful, Kane described the links on each of the second-level pages. As he did so, he sometimes invited relevant guests to speak about how they were using the Internet to enhance their work. For example, when describing the "Education" page, Kane paused for a word from Dr. Allen Meadors, CEO of Penn State Altoona, who mentioned that professors and students were developing individual pages and gaining wider audiences for their writings. It seems that Kane even gave a shoutout or shared the stage with New Pig. a company that manufactured industrial cleanup supplies! The overall message of the program was that the Internet, and ALTBLA, could benefit a wide variety of constituents near and far.
Through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, I found a snapshot from July 1997 of the ALTBLA landing page. Sadly, most of the graphics that embellished it are missing, and many of the links led to 404 messages. However, the "Library" link still worked. It provided a photo, brief information, and a catalog link for both AAPL and Penn State Altoona's Eiche Library. There was also a link to a list of other libraries in Blair County. While the Eiche Library had its own web page, AAPL and all the other public libraries did not. Those who wanted to access AAPL's catalog and other online resources had to dial-in using Telnet, a text-based protocol.
[Telnet -- OMG, the memories!]
At the time, Kane and his colleagues may have thought that they had made a long-lasting contribution toward finding Altoona and Blair County resources online. But as it turned out, the Internet evolved faster than most people could have imagined. Within less than a year, rudimentary directories such as Yahoo were replaced with increasingly powerful search engines from Mosaic to Ask Jeeves to Google. Gradually, all the organizations mentioned in this story developed websites of their own. For instance, no later than May 2000, AAPL's first website emerged -- and it even had clickable buttons shaped like card catalog drawers running down its left side. So, the need for ALTBLA and its content quickly subsided.
Overall, this story may seem like a "nothingburger," but to me, it demonstrates some important points about the early history of our online world. While many chroniclers point to 1989 as the year Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the Internet, most everyday people, at least in smaller cities like Altoona and rural counties like Blair, did not gain hands-on experience using it until the mid-1990s. Some did not become involved in web authorship until years after that. Given the yearlong effort to produce ALTBLA, it also seems that the cost of equipment and the lack of technical expertise prevented many from getting online as quickly as they wanted to. Thirdly -- as demonstrated by the several meetings Altoona and Blair County leaders attended to discuss the presentation of their region in the digital environment -- there was a moment in history when people thought very deeply about what the Internet should do for *community* life (not just corporate bottom lines). Finally, as illustrated by ALTBLA's high-profile unveiling, the occasion of claiming one's space in this new environment was momentous and exhilarating. Comparing this moment to the current build-up surrounding AI -- which is being pushed hard, top-down, by tech bros and corporate leaders, while encountering significant resistance among the general public -- is it possible that we have we lost a sense of the costs, effort, learning-curve, thoughtfulness, and wonder that using new technologies have always entailed? It would be interesting to hear Matthew Kane's and other community leaders' perspectives on that.
For more information:
- Altoona Area Public Library, Administrative Office files, folder "Internet Partnership."
- Altoona Area Public Library, Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, June 28, 1995.
- Kane, Matthew, "Homepage Gives People Worldwide Information Online," The Mirror (Altoona, PA), March 18, 1996.
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