On Tuesday, July 25, 2000, Deborah Woodyard said:

> [snip re budget not separate - understood and thanks]

> We have a
> section called the Electronic Unit which consists of 5 staff
> who select,
> negotiate with publishers, collect and catalogue the online
> publications for
> PANDORA, plus support from staff in the IT area and other
> staff involved
> with issues such as developing preservation solutions.

Deborah, this sound like good progress, because Philip's article in the Journal
of Electronic Publishing
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/phillips.html
mentioned that you had no additional funding, and when you began you had no
resources, took staff from other tasks and developed an "unsophisticated set of
software tools". The same paragraph (11th) mentioned "frustrating period system
failure and labour-intensive operations..."

So I am walking a path well trodden, and there is indeed hope that once pilot
projects can show some useful results, organizational and management support can
be forthcoming.

We (I) haven't got the cataloguing part yet. So I look forward to looking up
some of the titles in your collection on the online cataloguing and seeing how
they are described and handled.(Another task for me - help my Library justify,
identify, negotiate, purchase, install, test, perfect and train staff on an
Integrated Library system to take over from our random collection of home-grown
Oracle Data-bases, and which might also allow for direct access from an OPAC).

The article also pointed the way to WebZip at
http://spidersoft.com/webzip/default.asp which sounds good. Not having
administrator rights on my work PC (NT environment) I have to ask my
organization's IT people to download and install it for me (policy - not
necessarily technical). But Harry (Verwayen) you might find this of interest and
use also.

Charles McDonald pointed the way to CVS and rsync - Looking at those is about
when I had that strange feeling which Henry has so precisely identified as those
of "a baby dinosaur in a tar pit". "XXXX for Dummies" here I come. (Now if only
I could offload all my other duties and concentrate on this - sounds like it
could be fun!)

> [Back to Deborah]
> Check it out at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandora/ . It
> really is impressive
> when you understand what is involved (even if I do say so myself!).

It really is great - (I downloaded "Feather Dusters" by Marea Hanna Whitley
-having just read "Bridge over my sorrows" and "Angela's Ashes" I found it
fascinating that Irish/Catholic education/upbringing stories had echoes in my
own country - being a "public" myself I didn't know about it. But this is a
total aside to the discussion!)

> There are days when it all looks too hard and I feel like
> saying "just print
> it" too, but I disagree it is the only sensible answer. And
> there are lots
> of people working on it...

Sorry - I should have said only sensible answer for **us** at the moment -
pending the review of the pilot project. I'm so grateful that this list has
sprung to life - its a great shot in the arm to know that there are fellow works
in the vineyard.

> Another discussion list which deals with these and other digital
> preservation issues is padiforum-l, details available from
> http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/forum/

Thanks - will look into this. Philip's article also gave me hope when she said
in the 5th paragraph that "to-date" (time of the writing of the article) the
National Library had focused primarily on the first of the two step process.
That of identifying, collecting and making accessible items in their current
format (the archiving process), leaving the second step, that of managing the
materials in such a way that they remain accessible as technology changes (the
preservation process) for later.

This latter is very much Henry's point when he said I should just print things
out. My hope (no doubt vain) has been that we have gone over the major hump in
that, with HTML and associated languages, backward compatibility would not be
such a problem. However I did I mentioned that some of my "archive" (tiny as it
is Henry) was saved in Microsoft formats - Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc., to
which Charles McDonald responded:

>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.

I wonder then if I should embark on a process of saving all the Word Documents
in HTML format, which is one option on Word2000's "save-as" option. Still stuck
with Microsoft output unfortunately. And as for saving a PowerPoint presentation
in HTML format - is that even possible?

Glad to see Gail Feldman and Marlita Kahn of the Internet Archive join us from
the beautiful grounds of the Presidio (say Hi to my wife's brother, Bill Hough,
if you ever run into him there), and give us an update on their activities.
Assistance with some sort of harvesting system sounds good. What I baulk at due
to the added amount of work that entails, is the need (as both Deborah and
Charles mention) to get permission from the web page owners for a more public
archive of "Baha'icania" . On the whole, those that are Baha'is, or sympathetic
to the goals of the Faith. would probably not be a problem - but we (I) also
want to collect the anti-Baha'i sites as well. So maybe a bit of collusion
would indeed be best - getting others to collect those sites that may not
respond to a direct request from a Baha'i Library for permission to archive
their site. Something else to add to my to-do list!

John (Bangsund), as a fellow "non-fully-grokker" I welcome the knowledge that
I'm not alone. Like you, I'm going to have to just lurk for a week or so - other
duties call (like packing and moving parts of the physical collection!)

But I'm glad to see the list alive - and thanks Lee for reviving it.

warm regards to all,
Bryn Deamer
Electronic Information Systems Librarian
(A.K.A. - Jack of all trades - and yes - master of none!)

Ph. +972 835 8310 Bahá'í World Centre Library
http://library.bahai.org P.O. Box 155
Email: xlib@... 31001 Haifa, Israel
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