Exploiting the far-reaching possibilities of the Internet, various other services apart from the World Wide Web exist. In fact, new ones are added continually, while others fall into oblivion. Those rich resources may and should be considered to be added to the archive.
Newsgroups and mailing-lists are popular discussion forums that are open to the general public in principle. Both offer deep insight into prevalent matters of that time as average people see them. Devoted to specific topics, only few filter contributions in order to admit only those that are considered to be appropriate. This again provides a very broad view with the opinions being directly communicated.
So-called MUDs - Multi User Dungeons are on-line games attiring a broad scale of clients. Originally, the term referred to a particular game that was available in 1979 [Eva93], however, nowadays it stands for a whole class of them. In an extensible environment players navigate a character they created interacting with others. Following the role they have taken on, various tasks have to be solved. These virtual worlds are suitable for socialising and communicating with the other human players and are used as such.
Due to their high interactivity, however, MUDs are very difficult to capture and preserve. Establishing contact with the creators of the specific game offers probably the only possibility to acquire it completely. Alternatively, a player could be observed playing and this session is retained for the future.
Gateways for communication offer applications like ICQ. Client can inform on who else is on-line, exchange messages, or "talk" with each other. However, these sort of services intrude deeply into the privacy of the user and, thus, will not be gathered and entered into the archive. Just like e-mail, they are considered confidential.
In order to document aspects of the versatile face of the Internet, we have added the Austrian version of the mailing-list "Pressetext" to the AOLA-project. This service sends daily news to the subscriber. Each message addresses a single headline, consequently around 40 mails are delivered each day. Starting from May 2000 everything has been recorded, amounting to 18.363 distinctive mails until the end of September 2001. Those are collected in 17 separate folders, one for each month. Containing almost 1.100 distinctive entries, these mail-folders are approximately 7 megabyte in size. Since the messages are encoded in HTML-format consistently, they are technically easy to handle concerning provision of access as well as ensuring long-term preservation.
Further sources are planned to be incorporated in the archive, striving for a very broad and comprehensive profile.