My personal contribution to preventive archiving

February 27th, 2012 11:45 AM
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People like Mike Maginnis and Jason Scott have done a great deal to preserve the history of the Apple II. I got a taste for what it’s like to contribute to that effort when I recorded KansasFest 2010, publishing dozens of videos of otherwise ephemeral experiences — but it wasn’t until we lost Ryan Suenaga nearly a year ago that I realized the urgency of this work.

Ryan’s passing was unexpected, and he left many people lost without him. The consequences to his friends and family make everything else seem trivial by comparison, but I had to contribute what little I could to aspects of Ryan’s legacy that may otherwise go overlooked. I reconstituted RyanSuenaga.com, a domain that had expired during Ryan’s lifetime but which he was too busy to maintain. Similarly, Tony Diaz purchased A2Unplugged.com, ensuring that episodes of the A2Unplugged podcast — still the most prolific Apple II podcast to date, despite not having published a new episode in nearly two years — will remain available.

In a way, it’s too little, too late. We need to think about these worst-case scenarios before they happen. What does that mean for me? I don’t arrogantly assume my original work will be missed, but I recognize that my primary role in the Apple II community is as a channel for other people’s talents: I solicit and publish writers in Juiced.GS; I help bring people and luminaries together for KansasFest; and, with my co-host, I interview community members on Open Apple. Out of respect for the many volunteers who contribute to these outlets, I want this work to be tamper-proof while I’m alive — and continued when I’m not.

Last year, I devised a method for my digital assets to be accessed by a designated individual in the event of an emergency. It is a convoluted strategy that involves sealed envelopes, cross-country phone calls to strangers, and clues to decipher. Why I didn’t simply put my passwords in a bank deposit box to which a relative has the key, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve watched National Treasure too many times.

But more immediately, I wanted to get data that is already publicly available into more hands, to ensure it doesn’t suffer from a single point of failure. I’m relieved to have finally gotten to a point where I believe I have accomplished that goal. With help from Mike Maginnis, Steve Weyhrich, Ewen Wannop, Jeff Kaplan, and more, today marks a series of coordinated announcements:

Distribution and preservation: The benefits of an ISSN
Juiced.GS receives an ISSN from the Library of Congress and is archived by ten museums and universities around the world.
Preserving KansasFest videos: Internet Archive, iTunes, YouTube
KansasFest videos from 2009 and beyond to be made available in the Internet Archive, via an iTunes video podcast, and on YouTube.
Open Apple on the Internet Archive
Episodes of the Apple II community’s only co-hosted podcast now permanently available from a 501(c)(3) online library.

Some of these developments were easily accomplished; others required hours of busy work and calling in personal favors. Some were free but for our time and energy; others cost hundreds of dollars. All were group efforts that require ongoing commitments.

The work to ensure our Apple II heritage remains available to current and future generations never ends. Let’s make sure that which is unique is never lost.

Cultivating and cataloging online resources

September 23rd, 2010 12:18 PM
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If you have access to the Internet — and if you don’t, I’m curious how you’re reading this — then Apple II support is just a click away. From software vendors to hardware manufacturers, message boards to chat rooms, program repositories to magazine archives, there’s a Web site for everything.

Or is there? Doubtless there’s room for growth in any community, and we should encourage new online enterprises. They needn’t be commercial in nature. For example, this blog is a mere five months old, but I think it is doing something that no one else is: producing original content on a regular basis about what it means to be an Apple II user. What other online resources could serve the Apple II and its fans?

However, a problem with a growing community is awareness of its new members. When a site launches, how does one make its presence known, and how does it become able to be found? This isn’t the old days of GEnie, when we could move to page 645 and find everything meticulously organized (or, in today’s lingo, “curated”) into searchable topics, categories, and libraries. Instead, the Internet offers so many destinations that any one site can easily be overlooked.

There are a couple attempts to address this issue. David Kerwood maintains the A2-Web!, intended as a comprehensive index of Apple II resources, from user homepages to emulator download sites and online stores. The site contains many vendors I’ve never seen referenced elsewhere, leading to some wonderful discoveries. However, A2-Web! is often dependent on user contributions for reports of new or broken links, resulting in some occasionally outdated data. A chronological record of changes lacks an RSS list, making it hard to discover these updates.

David also coordinates the 32-member Apple II webring, a pre-search-engine networking concept devised by GeoCities.

More recently, Bill Martens has been maintaining the Apple Archives, which links to Apple II content but also hosts quite a bit itself, including scans of well-known publications. Instead of textual descriptions of the site, the indices offer image thumbnails of the Web sites; clicking on these will sometimes offer a more verbose description with a link to the actual site, though some listings, like KansasFest and Juiced.GS, lack a detailed description. Like A2-Web!, the Apple Archives is broken down into several categories, but their entries aren’t in alphabetical order, and a few could use more obvious categorization: for example, Syndicomm is listed under “Programming”, “Support/Projects”, and “Vendors”, but not “Software” or “Docs”. There also doesn’t appear to be a category for blogs and other hobbyist pursuits.

Although the Internet offers unprecedented opportunity for peer-to-peer support, and the above efforts make creating and finding these sites vastly easier, it’s apparent that the Apple II community still has work to do. Just as programmers sometimes solicit ideas for new software, I’m eager to hear your ideas for new Web sites and online tools. What changes or additions would you suggest the wealth of Apple II online resources adopt? And how can we disseminate news of those changes in a way that makes them able to be found not just by today’s members, but by tomorrow’s newcomers as well?