Videos

The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the first-ever YouTube video. The 170-year-old London museum is dedicated to applied arts and design, and a more typical exhibit might be a Renaissance tapestry or a piece of ornate Japanese furniture. But the museum has been building a digital collection, including GIFs from WeChat. The YouTube video (“Me at the Zoo”) will be displayed on a period-appropriate front end, using archived code, and with banner ads from the time. It also required careful reconstruction, because in the prehistory of 2005, the web still ran on Adobe Flash. YouTube’s early decisions “created interaction design patterns for social media and other platforms still in use today,” the V&A said, making the video a valuable historical artifact.