ABSTRACT
Home page is a comforting metaphor. It suggests familiarity and welcome. It is among the many ingenious metaphors that domesticated the Internet by making strange new digital things feel like recognizable old things. Parker Library on the Web first launched in 2009. In its time, Parker 1.0 was a remarkable innovation that adapted a combination of manuscript, print, and digital norms to conjoin cataloguing with images of the items catalogued. Countering the newness of ‘web’, the three manuscript images at the centre of the home page deepen the site’s historical lineage. The site’s textual description echoes Parker’s original conditions of access, which required the library to be open during certain hours: ‘WELCOME. Digital publishing, however, requires infrastructure that brings new forms of restriction. The home page thus also includes links to legal information that communicate the terms of intellectual property. The ‘Copyright’ notice invokes the legal codes of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
