June 13, 2013, 3:26pm EDT | Updated: June 27, 2013, 3:20am EDT

Meet the Internet pioneer who lays claim to the world's first webpage

Enlarge Image » Paul Jones, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Paul Jones created one of the first webpages in North America, a predecessor to his ibiblio digital archive and library. Jones is a professor at the University of North Carolina and director of ibiblio. He's also an avid social networker. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Laura Baverman, Upstart Business Journal
Contributing Writer
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The UpTake: The man at the center of a search for the world's first webpages has one of the largest free digital archives, and plans to reinvent that body of information for the 21st century of digital content created in the social web.

The North Carolina man who’s become central to an international search for the first-ever webpage is as much in the future as the past.

Paul Jones has spent his entire career teaching journalism and library science courses at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, all while managing one of the first free digital archives and hosting sites in the world.

Called ibiblio, the site has one of the largest “collections of collections” on the web, providing free software and information on all sorts of topics. There’s free e-books from Project Gutenberg, the live concert recordings of etree.org, NASA educational videos and hundreds of song downloads (along with guitar strings) from Roger McGuinn, the famous musician behind the Byrds and Mr. Tambourine Man. Since ibiblio launched (initially as SunSITE with partner Sun Microsystems in October 1992), it's been copied in 30 countries and become one of several early pioneers of the open-source movement.

Ibiblio has proved its usefulness to the world, and will continue to offer up all that data and information, says Jones. But he has a new challenge ahead. He wants to figure out how to archive the real-time interactive content that’s shared on social media.

With help from current sponsors like IBM, NetApp, Fedora and The Internet Archive, he hopes to preserve and curate information so you can interact with it in 20 years just like today. How that works, Jones hasn't a clue.

"At a university, we try to take on questions that there may not yet be an economic utility for, but we see a long-term social utility that may be possible economic utility in the future,” he says.

Laura Baverman, Upstart Business Journal
Laura Baverman, Upstart Business Journal
Contributing Writer
Email

Laura Baverman is a business journalist newly relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina. Before her move, Laura spent nearly four years tracking Cincinnati's growing technology and startup scene for the Cincinnati Enquirer.

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