Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 21:05:53 +1100
From: Steve Wright <pmargin-AT-froggy.com.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: archives


The return of Tom's archive (yay) makes me think of an issue that Harry
raised sometime last year - namely, what (if any) efforts are being made
to preserve the many outpourings from left libertarian circles that have
appeared on the Internet over the past decade or so.

I know that over the years many of us have built up our own private
collections of such files on hard drives and other media, along with
publicly accessible collections like Tom's and (before that) the Spunk
archive. But is anyone systematically seeking to collect this stuff?

It's an important issue for a number of reasons: apart from the fate of
geocities (where many of us had our earliest sites in the mid 1990s), even
websites that aren't on commercially owned servers frequently revamp
themselves, removing older files/pages in the process.

To take one example: an earlier version of the Radio Sherwood website, as
a webzine Sherwood Tribune, is now nowhere to be found online (or at
least, so far as I can ascertain).

I'm not sure if others want to talk about how to address such matters as
an autopsy list thread - although I'd want to argue that access to such
material can be a useful part of the circulation of struggles, so it's not
entirely off topic. But if such a thread doesn't take off here, and you'd
like to bounce around some ideas about how to tackle this, feel free to
drop me a line offlist.

Steve




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