Overview

Cool Site of the Day was an early curated Web resource created by Glenn Davis during the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web in 1994.

Rather than attempting to catalogue the Web comprehensively, the site highlighted a single selected website each day. Visitors were directed from the Cool Site of the Day page to a destination chosen by Davis, while earlier selections were retained through an associated archive.

The resource was publicly announced by Davis in August 1994 at http://www.infi.net/cool.html.

Its selective approach represented an early form of editorial Web discovery: the value of the resource derived not from automated indexing, but from the selection and recommendation of material considered noteworthy by its maintainer.

During the following years the project expanded substantially. By 1997 it was operating through InfiNet infrastructure at cool.infi.net and had developed from its original two-page form into a larger publishing operation.

Cool Site of the Day is significant to the Bureau as an early example of human-curated discovery during a period in which conventions for navigating and evaluating the rapidly expanding public Web were still developing.

Preservation Note

The original 1994 network location documented for Cool Site of the Day no longer provides access to the historical Digital Object.

Later versions of the project operated at other network locations, including locations associated with the name Cool Site of the Day. The domain coolsiteoftheday.com has also been associated with later manifestations of the project and remains relevant to its documentary history.

The existence of a currently accessible resource using the same name or an historically associated domain is not, by itself, sufficient to establish continuity with the Digital Object created in 1994.

Surviving archival captures, contemporary references and later documentary sources preserve evidence of the site’s historical operation, but the Bureau does not presently treat any currently accessible representation as an intact instance of the original operational resource.

The object is therefore recorded as historically unavailable with partial preservation through archival and documentary evidence.

Questions concerning later network locations and possible continuity, replacement or reconstruction remain subject to provenance examination.