ABSTRACT
The Web is a public space, and a predominantly visual environment, like the museum. Yet at the same time the World Wide Web is predicated on the written word, like archives. The Archives Hub sometimes receives direct enquiries via telephone or e-mail from Web users who clearly have failed to understand what they have been looking at. When the Archives Hub publishes a finding aid for the records of a corporate body such as a commercial company, visitors who have reached the finding aid directly from a search engine such as Google will have little context in which to interpret this document. Such users may completely fail to recognize this very particular genre of document and therefore assume that they have reached the company's own corporate website, even mistaking the Archives Hub's helpline telephone number and e-mail address for those of the company whose records are being described.
