The Internet Archive uses automated software crawlers to follow links across the web. When a crawler encountered the domain for the Hotel Courbet, it saved the underlying HTML code, images, style sheets, and directory structures.
Digital archives provide critical primary and secondary sources on this period: Biographical Texts : Scanned volumes like Gustave Courbet Internet Archive hotel courbet internet archive
So next time you check into a bland, generic hotel, ask yourself: Will anyone care enough to archive your room’s website in 50 years? For a brief, beautiful moment in Paris, Hotel Courbet proved that a hotel website could be art. And thanks to the Internet Archive, that art never truly dies. The Internet Archive uses automated software crawlers to
The Hotel Courbet and the Internet Archive: Preserving Digital Art History For a brief, beautiful moment in Paris, Hotel
The earliest captures show a garish, neon-green webpage built with HTML tables. This was the hotel’s first attempt at a digital guest book. Transients from the analog world would type messages into a kiosk in the lobby. Those messages—often poetic, drunken, or profound—were automatically uploaded to a GeoCities mirror. Thanks to Archive-It (the Internet Archive's web crawling service), you can read the raw, unfiltered entries from travelers who have long since passed through.