There are very few places where mods could stand side-by-side with rockers, hippies with skinheads, or emos with punks without the flicking of knives, the stomping of boots or the hoiking up of phlegm.

But these disparate and frequently warring youth tribes – not to mention the Teddy boys, psychobillies, new romantics, ravers, crusties, hoodies and nu-ravers – have at last achieved the kind of harmony on the internet that has all too often eluded them in the real world.

They live on, for ever young and stylish, in a new multimedia archive that aims to provide a definitive visual, verbal and musical history of the past 70 years of youth culture.

Among the thousands of images in the Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive are Parisian beatniks pontificating over coffee and cigarettes, rockers frozen in time at the Ace cafe in 1964, sun-kissed hippies sucking earnestly on their joints, punk girls sitting in a burnt-out car, and ecstatic, exhausted acid house ravers heading for a crashing comedown.

Alongside the haunting hairstyles, the brothel creepers, the Doc Martens and the old-school trainers featured on the PYMCA Cultural Research site are lists of, and links to, the key songs, books and films of the time.

The site, which has been 10 years in the making, also features timelines of some of the big events of the decades: Christian Dior's New Look, the publication of Dr No, the assassination of JFK, the end of the Vietnam war, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, and September 11.

The collection is swelled by video footage and essays from writers including Ted Polhemus, King Adz, Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster.

The aim is to provide subscribers to the site – be they universities, advertising firms or individuals – with a one-stop shop for information and material on the history of post-war youth movements.

The Joint Information Systems Committee, an independent advisory body that supports UK colleges and universities in the use of digital technologies, thinks the site could help students in disciplines such as fashion, marketing, anthropology, social sciences and history.

"It can be used in a variety of applications," said Anna Vernon, Jisc's licensing manager. "Students could copy parts into their dissertations, presentations, into virtual learning environments or into a sketchbook to develop a concept."

Although the internet is brimming with facts, figures, essays and photos, Vernon pointed out that not all of them were free – or freely available.

"It seems straightforward but it's increasingly difficult for students to find and use legitimate sources of information, and by working with organisations such as PYMCA and librarians we make sure that digital content can be found and used by students across the UK."

Those involved with the site, however, hope it will soon turn into something far more relevant than a simple record of which tribe used to ride down to the south coast to eat ice lollies and knock seven bells out of its rivals.

Ted Polhemus, an anthropologist who is interested in style and visual culture, thinks it will act as a conduit and a forum for youth cultures from around the world.

"In this country, there's a kind of new imperialist cultural attitude about street style as a British phenomenon – that it's something that comes from the UK or the US and that it's something the rest of the world follows," he said. "But it's now everywhere. The wonderful thing is that in a year's time, we'll have been able to input information about youth culture from India and Indonesia and elsewhere where these things are bubbling up."

The gothloli (Gothic-Lolita) subculture, which is already on the wane in Japan, is taking root thousands of miles away on the streets of Buenos Aires, said Polhemus, while street battles have broken out between the emos and punks of Mexico City.

"After the media shines a spotlight on it, it just withers and dies," said Polhemus. "But thanks to the internet, these things can filter back and influence other places. PYMCA will work as a kind of hub to take these bits of information and feed them back so that they can be known about in other places."

The author, who was a student in the 1970s, is delighted at academia's changing attitudes to the affiliations and rivalries of the young.

"When I was studying anthropology at University College London in the mid-1970s, my professors were saying to me that I should be studying something important, not youth style," he said. "Now you get people doing PhDs on street style in Japan, so people are catching up."

What happens next, said Polhemus, is anybody's guess. The unmediated and individualistic nature of the internet, coupled with young people's increasing suspicions about the commercial world, has made youth culture gloriously unpredictable.

"There ain't going to be a next big thing because it's all spinning off into a magnificent diversity for the first time in our tribe's history," he said. "There's an unprecedented degree of personal creativity that's coming from anywhere and everywhere. We are now in a truly global age where it's being inputted from all four corners of the globe."