Offline version of the Archivist design guide?

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imoskvin
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Offline version of the Archivist design guide?

Post by imoskvin »

Possibly related to the "Archiving the Forums?" thread. Please excuse my ignorance if this is an uncouth question. I'm not entirely sure of the licensing implications of what I'm about to ask, nor do I mean to imply that a community invested in archiving would let an important resource succumb to digital rot, but...

Is there an offline version of the Archivist Design Guide? I've looked around, and I could not find one. I'd love to have one for peace of mind. Right now, there's no easy way to duplicate the guide to ensure its continued survival.

I'm finally in a place in life where I have the time and space to re-engage with reading and DIY archiving. Building an Archivist is high on my bucket list. As I've returned to the guide, I've realized that it's been five years since its publication. According to one source, the average website lifespan is 2 years and 7 months. So on the one hand, it's doing great for its age. On the other hand, that age is starting to show.

For example, I see that many of the thumbnails appear broken (403). I'm guessing this might be due to the WordPress site having been made static at some point in time. Something must have gotten lost in translation. I'm not too concerned, since the full-sized images they link to are still there, so the guide would be easy enough to fix, for now, but thinking in the long term...

I feel that to properly preserve this guide, it's not enough to run it through a static-site converter. It has to be converted by hand to ensure all of the content, navigation, and formatting stay intact, including anything relevant that might be hosted elsewhere (e.g. Vimeo). I don't think it would be quite right to provide a PDF version of it either.

I have experience with academic digital publishing in the museum sphere. I'd love to go through and convert the guide into something compatible with a static site generator, and publish that source code on GitHub. I think this is a sustainable approach. (For example, see The Getty's stance on static sites.) It would be easy for someone to make a personal copy of the guide simply by cloning the repo from GitHub and (maybe) running a script to generate the site.

However, I want to (1) make sure I'm on the level in terms of licensing, and that (2) no one else has already done this.

In short, would this be kosher? Is this something that others would be interested in seeing made?
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Offline version of the Archivist design guide?

Post by daniel_reetz »

If you're willing to put in the effort, I am willing to support this work, enthusiastically. We'll have to figure out what it means to host it elsewhere (I really want the "canonical" copy to remain here).

Since I control the license, I can help alleviate any issues there.
duerig
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Re: Offline version of the Archivist design guide?

Post by duerig »

I was the one who did the conversion from the original Wordpress to the current static site version. If you want to do a more manual and thorough conversion in the near future, I can wait until your finished and post the result here. If it will be a longer term project for you, then let me know and I will spend some time trying to fix the embedded image issue you noticed in the current site.
imoskvin
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Re: Offline version of the Archivist design guide?

Post by imoskvin »

Thank you for the quick response, and for the support! In terms of timeline, I can get a first draft to review done by end of April.

For now, I'll be pushing my work here: https://github.com/IllyaMoskvin/archivist. If there is an organization on GitHub where you'd like me to transfer the repo, please add me as a member, or create a repository for me and add me as an outside collaborator, and I'm happy to push my code there instead. From a GitHub perspective, I definitely want you all to have the canonical repository, rather than a fork.
We'll have to figure out what it means to host it elsewhere (I really want the "canonical" copy to remain here).
Sounds good! Maybe some verbiage could be added to the footer to say where the canonical copy can be found? Along with a request on the licencing page to not remove that notice if rehosting, so long as the original website still exists. Just spit-balling.

We can also add tags like this to the head of each page:

Code: Select all

<link rel="canonical" href="https://diybookscanner.org/archivist/pages/196/glass-brackets" />
This should make it so that if anyone else hosts a public copy of your website, only your website will show up in search results. Links to their website will be treated as links to your website when calculating search engine rankings.

In terms of next steps, if it's not too much trouble, it would be helpful to have a local copy of the https://diybookscanner.org/archivist/ directory. I just want to make sure that I don't miss anything during the conversion. I'm happy to continue this conversation via PMs or elsewhere, if there's a need to exchange confidential information.
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