Historians are working to study the development of the internet and the World Wide Web, as well as to preserve digital history.

Digital humanities needs to grapple with issues of digital preservation and conservation, key aspects of any notion of digital history.

Preserving the constantly changing digital universe of the World Wide Web is an impossibility. Websites are continually updated, meaning there is no stable web universe, even for a moment.

A more reasonable goal for digital historians is to preserve the earliest versions of the World Wide Web. Historians and computer techs are now attempting to reconstruct the earliest webpages and preserve the earliest web servers.

NPR reports on these attempts.