One of the many outstanding services that the National Library of Australia offers is an archive of websites called PANDORA: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia.

New Mandala has been archived through this system since soon after we launched in 2006. The system takes a full snapshot of our site every November so that you can navigate around as though you were sitting at your machine on the day in question.

PANDORA is becoming a simply amazing archival resource for charting the development of the Internet’s Australian websites. More details on its purpose and activities are available here.

In recognition of this resource, today I thought it worth pointing New Mandala readers back to the 2006 snapshot of this website. It is a fully functional (but static) version from 9 November 2006. This was, of course, not long after all of the drama and busyness of the 2006 coup in Thailand. Readers who have only been around in more recent years will note the very different colour scheme. There are all kinds of other changes in style and substance that perceptive readers will probably also pick up.

In occasional idle moments I sometimes wonder what curious students or scholars will make of these archived websites in 10, or 50, or 100 years. Our tentative nibbles at the wonder that is becoming the academically-focused participatory Internet will surely look odd from their perspective.

In the meantime, all I can promise is that some radical changes to New Mandala are lurking just over the horizon. The archived copy of the website for 2011 will look quite different indeed.