It has only been twenty years since the advent of the website. But could this ubiquitous piece of our digital lives soon go the way of the dinosaur? In an interview with ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus, Library of Congress curator Jim Boulton makes the bold claim that in a few years time, “there wont be such a thing as a website.” He’s kidding, right? Not likely.

Part of the reason for this belief is the challenge of archiving sites, he says, noting that he first website, CERN developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 no longer exists. Nor is there a screenshot of it. It’s a piece of our digital history that is simply gone forever. Boulton and Web Archiving Team Lead Abbie Grotke say this is common because of the transient nature of websites. We view sites as items we use and dispose of. Additionally, social media and smartphones have effectively changed the nature of how we access information—information comes to us.

Still it is possible to relive the early years of websites and examine how contemporary media maintains it’s digital ancestry (check out, for example, Flipboard’s precursor, Word.com, and much more in this Digital Archaeology ^[1] exhibit.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb ^[2].