In the 1990s, materials from library special collections were some of the first to appear online. Such items were in the public domain and could be used as experiments for the expansion of knowledge meant to be achieved via the WorldWideWeb and other entries into websites.
If you go to GoogleBooks, you can today begin to experiment yourself with the use of the words relating to archives, archive, and archiving. As Tulane’s reference librarian Victorian Elmwood noted, “Just playing around with it, I was able to return some interesting results about the appearance of a couple forms” of these words. The caveat here is “that this only reflects the contents of books published between 1500 and 2008 whose text is both contained in Google Books and is machine-readable.” That said, in the graph above, we can easily see something of the trend over the last two hundred years, which we can investigate in other ways as we go along.
Keeping (and Telling) the Past 