In 1996, the World Wide Web was starting to catch on. Politicians were just beginning to explore how to use online communication to reach voters. And in a house in San Francisco, the fledgling Internet Archive was starting to archive pieces of the web before they disappeared.

That same year, a letter arrived from Washington, D.C., with the Smithsonian Institution’s iconic sunburst logo at the top. The Smithsonian had agreed to partner with the Internet Archive to preserve the digital record of the 1996 U.S. presidential election.

“It was a major milestone for us,” recalls Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “The big Smithsonian was working with this new little Internet Archive nonprofit library.”

Together, the two institutions launched Web Archive 96, one of the first web collections the Internet Archive ever created. It captured the early campaign webpages of candidates Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot — online brochures filled with policy positions, photos, and promises — along with news coverage of the race. It was a pioneering effort to preserve the political life of a nation as it moved onto the web. The collection is now a foundational part of our cultural history on the web, and is available for public access via the Wayback Machine.

Explore Web Archive 96 via the Wayback Machine

Nearly thirty years later, that collaboration still stands out as visionary: two institutions, one old and one new, working together to recognize the internet as part of our shared cultural record.

Politics Goes Digital

In Washington, D.C., the National Museum of American History added a personal computer displaying online presidential election website content to its “We The People” campaign exhibit. “It was delivered and was displayed next to campaign buttons from the 1800s,” Kahle recalled.

Indeed, Smithsonian curators Larry Bird and Harry Rubenstein traveled to New Hampshire and Iowa every four years to collect buttons, signs and physical memorabilia from the campaign offices. Just as television changed the political landscape in the 1960s, they recognized the potential influence of the web in 1996. When they heard Kahle was archiving campaigns, Bird said they were “ecstatic” to collaborate.

“We were all over it,” said Bird, now a curator emeritus from the Smithsonian division of political history. “We were super glad that we could take this non-dimensional thing and for it to have a presence on the floor – even in this most rudimentary, stripped down way – limited to the candidates’ websites. It was an acknowledgement of where things were heading.”

Jeff Ubois, who forged the partnership in 1996, recalled “Why would anyone care about the ephemera of the web?” as the prevailing attitude at the time. “The Smithsonian helped change some of that.”

Once the Internet Archive partnered with the Smithsonian, “it wasn’t possible to dismiss web archiving as irrelevant, impossible, useless,” Ubois said.

People contact the Smithsonian often, Bird said, and the Internet Archive outreach was unexpected, but welcome. “We were constantly looking at the way things were shifting in politics, which always takes what’s popular and successful in the real world and bends it into its own political world or reality,” he said. “And this just seemed to be yet, the latest iteration of that as a cultural phenomenon….To have [the Internet Archive] assemble it wasn’t anything that any of us could have done at the time.”

‘Collection of Record for the Web’

Bird said the Internet Archive is a “remarkable resource” that he and other researchers have relied on for years.

“The museum is the collection of record for material things, objects, and dimensional things. And the Internet Archive is the collection of record for the web and all that implies,” Bird said. “There’s hardly anything that it doesn’t touch anymore. It didn’t start out that way, but it’s become that. It’s the collection of record that people use and cite and compare. It’s a tremendous historical resource.”

Preserving the evolution of political campaigns is important to anyone trying to do research or understand political trends over time, said David Almacy, president and chief executive officer of Far Post Media, a digital public affairs firm in Virginia and former White House E-Communications Director for President George W. Bush. In 1996, campaign websites were primarily online brochures – just text and photos without much customization. Today, websites are more advanced with video, digitally integrated with interactive elements that can be tailored to the user.

“The value is to provide an archive and a record of what was said, and basically a snapshot in time politically,” Almacy said. “It actually becomes fascinating to go back and look at the issues that were facing the country that would be deemed priorities in 1996 and how that compares to today. I assume a lot are the same – the economy, education, immigration, national security, global peace – but they’ve evolved in different ways. Many are very important to Americans, just as they were back then.”