The NDN is a professional and public site. The authority is represented as a collective, which is primarily explained on the 'About Us' page. Otherwise, throughout the website, the authorial presence is consciously diminished. This enhances the positivist ethos of the research purpose, by creating the effect that user interactions with the sources are objective. Authority represented through categorisation, searching mechanisms and structural framework is unproblematised by the site. There is no facitility, for example, for users to add their own categorisations of images or documents into the site. Therefore, the designers have attempted to achieve a digitalisation of an archive, without effecting the other features of a hypermedia environment. As such, the author/reader boundary remains untouched. However, as a site related to the field of history, it is assumed that people will be creating historical analysis using the archives. The 'Features' section addresses this issue slightly by acting as a board to publish interpretations, but it is not interactive to the sense that there is a place for responses, alterations or changeable work. This only means that there is multiple authorship in certain places in the site.
Candace Rich is the creator of 'The Fifties' Web'. For a history site, the authorial presence is very strong and puts forward definite opinions. Her voice is singular although at times judgmental, other times 'objective' but can also be evident as a persona. This persona relates the narrative to an experience of 1950s as it was lived, whereas the judgmental voice views this time in retrospect.
The persona speaks with the slang and idiom of the times, for instance:
"Got any change? Let's play some tunes while we sit here in the diner and wait on our burgers. So, who are you taking to the hop on Saturday? Whatayameaaan you can't dance. I can teach you the all the dance sensations. 'Cuz I dig it, Daddy-O. Then we can move it and groove it At The Hop. But, meanwhile, put a quarter in the machine, will ya?"In recreating the sound and mood of the 1950s, this is a form of cultural representation. It creates a problem, particularly as part of an archive site, in how to treat this material within historical analyses. It adds to the cultural environment of the site but has no specific reference or validity. How can we classify this as a source in itself? Furthermore, how can we classify its impact on the other sources? These are crucial questions, since all the sources in this site are embedded in this kind of context, which is facilitated by this new hypermedium. This type of narrative is a re-creation of history and concerns the production by the author as much as its reception by the user. Historical fact becomes indistinguishable from memory and the construction of both.
Randy Bass attempted to look at some issues involved in converting archives to the digital format. He posits that through increased access to these archives, but also with the new abilitiles to search and sort materials, that the relationship between the user and the archive will change. One key impact is that the boundary between the archive and the 'published artifact of the archive' is now blurring. This latter category helps us to understand where amateur collections such as 'The Fifties' Web' fit, since they are no longer the 'pure' archive which the NDN strives to maintain. However, analysis of the effect of narrative on ''The Fifties' Web' prove that the aspects of the web environment that Bass sees as critical in this change, need to be augmented by the structure, context and style within the site.