Archiving the Forums?
Posted: 09 Aug 2016, 21:40
Hi duerig and all other site admins,
First, thank you so very much for your ongoing work running the site. This website, and the forums in particular, are, in my mind, one of the lasting gems of the internet. That's not only for the current value of the discussions happening here, but also for the historical value.
I'm wondering whether any ongoing work is being done to archive the materials on this site in a lasting way. For example, beyond daily or weekly backups that you might have as site admins, is there any ongoing process in place to put copies of the site materials in the hands of long-term archivists (for example, through submitting periodic database dumps to the Internet Archive, or through spidering the site and turning it into a locally-viewable HTML zip file / tarball)?
I see this being useful for two reasons: first, in case some sort of catastrophe happens in which all of the servers crash at once, or the domain name gets hijacked somehow. Second, to enable research on what's happened here (I do a lot of text mining in my research, for example, and could see other researchers wanting to know how communication networks here have looked over time, what phrases come up most frequently, etc.).
If there isn't a process in place, but you'd be open to the idea, I'd be really happy to help with this. I'm currently finishing a doctorate in psychology and will thereafter be starting work at a university library, and so could also facilitate working with university institutional repositories, if that would be preferable to using the Internet Archive's services.
Thanks for your consideration!
-Jacob
First, thank you so very much for your ongoing work running the site. This website, and the forums in particular, are, in my mind, one of the lasting gems of the internet. That's not only for the current value of the discussions happening here, but also for the historical value.
I'm wondering whether any ongoing work is being done to archive the materials on this site in a lasting way. For example, beyond daily or weekly backups that you might have as site admins, is there any ongoing process in place to put copies of the site materials in the hands of long-term archivists (for example, through submitting periodic database dumps to the Internet Archive, or through spidering the site and turning it into a locally-viewable HTML zip file / tarball)?
I see this being useful for two reasons: first, in case some sort of catastrophe happens in which all of the servers crash at once, or the domain name gets hijacked somehow. Second, to enable research on what's happened here (I do a lot of text mining in my research, for example, and could see other researchers wanting to know how communication networks here have looked over time, what phrases come up most frequently, etc.).
If there isn't a process in place, but you'd be open to the idea, I'd be really happy to help with this. I'm currently finishing a doctorate in psychology and will thereafter be starting work at a university library, and so could also facilitate working with university institutional repositories, if that would be preferable to using the Internet Archive's services.
Thanks for your consideration!
-Jacob