The MouseSite is an archive of community memory reconstructing the pioneering efforts of computer scientists and electrical engineers led by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute to recast the computer as a communication device that would augment the human intellect rather than simply execute calculations. The result of their collaboration was a networked computer system, named "Augment," that by 1968 featured the world debut of the computer mouse, two-dimensional display editing, and hypermedia -- including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing. This group refined their invention by adding collaboration software and including the system within ARPAnet, but the loss of funding caused many to migrate to Xerox PARC in the 1970s. There, elements of the Augment system were incorporated into other experimental systems, such as the Alto workstation, whose development by PARC eventually shaped the broad contours of personal computing and set the stage for today's computing environment, which is far more centered around communication than was the case when Engelbart and his group began their work.

Because of the nature of the Augment and Xerox PARC work, it is especially fitting that their history should be captured and presented via the Web. A wealth of digital primary sources have been made available to the MouseSite, including: the 1968 multimedia demonstration of the Augment system; the photographic archive of Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute; interviews with original team members; collaborative journals used by the Augment group; and materials from the Engelbart Collection and the SRI archive at Stanford. In the spirit of Engelbart's original vision of networked computing as an interactive augmentation of human intelligence, MouseSite has recently begun to develop a multimedia pilot program that will deliver the project's unusually rich content in customized hypermedia modules tailored to the interests of web visitors. The modules will be structured by kernels of video documentary footage that are hyper-linked to other relevant archival media and then webcast over the internet using channel technology. The video narratives are gateways to interactive investigation by our users -- primarily students for the pilot -- who will be able to interrupt the narrative stream at any point to explore in depth a given topic.

This paper will discuss the progress MouseSite has made in constructing a community memory project of a technology within its own medium, as well as addressing the effectiveness of the site in engaging both historical actors and web site visitors. Special opportunities and challenges pertain to the group of computer pioneers under study; while their skills and work culture make them ideally suited to interact with the site and donate primary sources in web-friendly electronic formats, they are constrained by the tyranny of the computer industry's hectic pace and intense present-mindedness. The intended audience of MouseSite also presents a challenge, if only because it is heterogeneous. Tracking the progress of participants in the web channel pilot by recording their navigation of the web site will provide a rare opportunity to observe how readers interact with scholarship and primary sources. In discussing the ways in which MouseSite combines the function of scholarship on human-computer interaction with the form of web technologies, this paper will address the isues of technology and methodology that are uniquely relevant to the SHOT community.