Ancient Web: Ken Boschert’s Electronic Zoo Indexed the Animal Internet

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before searching the Web for animal information became an exercise in avoiding advertisements, Dr. Ken Boschert built an Electronic Zoo of links.

Visit the Electronic Zoo.

The front page is still an almost perfect portrait of the 1990s Internet. It offers categories for animals, veterinary medicine, publications, and organizations, but also separate lists of mailing lists, newsgroups, Telnet sites, FTP sites, and Gophers. Some of those network services still exist, though ordinary browsing has left many of them behind.

Boschert is identified as a veterinarian and associate director in the Division of Comparative Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. The page carries a copyright range of 1994–2002 and an institutional mailing address, not a dashboard full of user accounts.

The animal categories lead toward things ranging from breeds and husbandry to conservation organizations. A preserved bird-conservation directory includes rescue projects, Audubon groups, research organizations, and international bird associations. Another cat-associations list ranges across national clubs and breed registries.

These are not articles promising to have all the answers. They are shelves of annotated pointers directing a visitor to people and institutions who might.

When a website was a map of other websites

The design makes sense for a time when online information was dispersed across university servers, volunteer hobby pages, professional societies, FTP archives, and newsgroups. A carefully chosen directory was a service in itself.

The inner category pages even preserve their edition timestamps. Some identify July 5, 2000 as the last published edition, making the archive a dated snapshot rather than a current veterinary reference.

That distinction matters. Animal health advice, organizations, addresses, and professional practices change. Electronic Zoo is not a substitute for present-day veterinary care, and many outgoing links no longer work.

But those dead links are evidence too. They show the network of professional, educational, and enthusiast pages that once connected owners, veterinarians, scientists, and conservation groups across the early Internet.

The page still uses the old language of "this server" and asks visitors to send feedback directly to the maintainer. It imagines a Web organized by people who know their subjects and voluntarily build indexes for everyone else.

Browse Electronic Zoo's original subject and network-service directories.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.