Electronic Information Systems Librarian wrote:

> Since 1989 we have been receiving a few community or association newsletters
by email. Until 1999 when the World Centre changed to PC's with NT, we were
using UNIX in a character based environment. Thus such newsletters were saved to
sub-directories of UNIX. More and more such items were being received by the end
of the decade. We used PINE to save the files - many of which we could not even
read at the time.

Not a bad choce. Most web formats have viewers on Unix..

>
> However with the change to PC's and NT during 1998/9, a whole new world opened
up.

(Lots of security holes?)

>
> The Library was granted space to create an INTERNAL Web page. This has been
done, with one section being the "Electronic Collection". To this is saved any
electronically received item we can. At the moment there are 8 parts:
>
> 1. Annual and Convention reports of the National Baha'i Communities
> 2. Electronic Baha'i newsletters
> 3. Electronic Commercial and Scholarly journals
> 4. Miscellaneous
> 5. Online news source archive
> 6. Radio and TV Transcripts
> 7. Theses and Dissertations
> 8. Web page archives.
>
> The goal is to try to save whatever we get in a way that future users will be
able to experience what current users experience. This often means going into
the code or program and changing it so that is viewable in the available suite
of Microsoft tool.

Hate to say it, but Microsoft formats change too often to ever consider
using them as a way of keeping stuff. Even between the same version,
the look of a document can change if you load another program on the
same PC.

>
> Thus the items exist in two places - on the network drive, (sometimes in both
the original format and a local copy but we have not been consistent about
this), and in the Intra-web.
>
Keeping the original can help to reduce the loss of information when you
convert everything to some new format...

> Initially, the Library only had one Web but after about 3 months of building
the Web we suddenly found that all the HTML pages had been "themed" by
Front-page. This is sort of like taking the Mona-Lisa and changing its
background and colours!

Good old "front-page"

>
> For entire web sites, I have been using a program called Web-stripper.
However, I have not yet fully come to terms with it, and sometimes find myself
either saving too much or too little. Further, updating the web page is
problematic. We don't always want to overwrite the existing pages, since they
can be considered an earlier edition, but we don't want to duplicate the entire
site. Thus far we have got around it by first renaming the original sites-home
page saving any image files associated with it to another part of the Web before
updating the entire site. That way we can save a snapshot of what the site used
to look like at different parts of its history.

This is a job for CVS, see my other post.


> At the moment all of this is only visible within our organization - the Baha'i
World Centre and does not exist on our Public Web Site. Various decisions need
to be made before the collection, or parts of it, could be made public.

You would probaly need permison from each of you original authors...

>
--
Charles MacDonald Stittsville Ontario
...Just beyond the fringe
My homepage is at http://www.achilles.net/~cmacd/
CANDU Nuclear Power - The Answer to the Carbon Cycle
_______________________________________________
Archivists mailing list
Archivists@...
http://www.archive.org/mailman/listinfo/archivists