The University of Maryland and Webmergers.com have launched a Web site that aims to create a permanent record of the late 1990s dot-com era. The Business Plan Archive (BPA) will collect business-planning documents that entrepreneurs and researchers can use to learn from past business successes and failures.

The BPA is part of a major research project on the business of the Internet at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The site allows former executives, employees, investors, and customers who participated in the Internet boom and bust to submit business plans, marketing plans, technical plans, venture presentations, and other business documents from failed and successful Internet start-ups.

The archive will collect materials such as as e-mails, PowerPoint slide presentations, audio files, Java applets, and other electronic documentation. Webmergers.com, a San Francisco-based research firm, will contribute data and analysis from its database of information on technology mergers and acquisitions and dot-com shutdowns and bankruptcies.

"If we do not act now to document the dot-com happenings of the past several years, many of the events and firms that helped define the period will be forgotten," said David Kirsch, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business and head of the research project. "We must create a meaningful digital archive of this historic era of entrepreneurship. The business plans of the 1990s are important cultural products that represent the creative efforts of our age."

The BPA is part of a much larger archive being assembled by Kirsch. His project, which is funded through a $300,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will also document the personal experiences and accounts of the "refugees" or "working class" of the Internet boom and bust. Kirsch expects to conduct hundreds of interviews to capture these personal recollections. This information, as well as the business-planning documents, will be archived and permanently housed at the Archives and Manuscripts Department of the University of Maryland Libraries.

"While the Internet has allowed everyone to gain access to a multitude of documents from the past, it will be interesting to turn these online tools to the task of helping us understand the blossoming of the Internet itself," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that records Web pages for historical purposes.

Added Kirsch, "The over-arching goal of the project is to understand how people learn from failure. Both organizations and individuals carry the scars of the battles they have fought, but the specific learning pathways that connect the experience of failure to subsequent behavioral change have not yet been carefully explained."

LATEST NEWS

UCSD Plans First Flash-Based Supercomputer
Digging Into N.Y.'s Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Analyst: Sony-Ericsson's Android Bid Is Late
Coupon Site Targets Black Friday, Cyber Monday
Microsoft Sites Up Big in Time Spent Online