Ringing Forums

We’ve already seen a lot of correspondence from Yahoo groups and lots of other early email lists and forums disappear into the void. I would hope that we are protecting official email correspondence too.

strange that this topic should come up now:
1 I recently raised the question of archiving CC material that is of historical significance but likely to get lost. Currently the only formally retained documents are minutes and reports. They are certainly important but there can be a lot more of substance, as I discovered when I went through all the old Education Committee documents I had.
2 I was recently asked if all the discussion of NRT (Network for Ringing Training for those without long memories). The original Yahoogroups are long gone but it happened that (a) someone used to compile summaries of discussions (weeding out the noise and unscrambling crossed threads) and (b) I still had copies on my hard drive, do after some sorting and conversion I sent him a zip file.
Ideally there would be organisational mechanisms to ensure things are preserved that doesn't rely. On the right person happening to be in the right place at the right time.

I asked the CCCBR to set a policy recently as I had been collecting old CCCBR records and equipment for the Workgroup I lead. The new policy is to retain very litte, sadly. The problem is mainly one of storage ie again the issue of money. Also the question of storage medium but that again goes back to money when thought through. .

the issue of money — Alison Hodge

I can't think that a few high capacity USB SSD drives are going to break the bank, and there are any number of free / cheap cloud based storage services.

There are 2 primary issues that would need to be considered:

• Content format. I expect most of the content of interest would be text based, in which case Plain Old ASCII Text is the best format - other formats such as MSWord or PDF require the corresponding software to render them, and take significantly more storage space. For example, the PDF of the 104-page 1988 survey that I re-rendered to plain text is 1/32 of the size of the original, and when compressed, 1/132 of the size. You could fit 26 copies of it on an ancient floppy disk, or ~19,000 copies on a nearly-as-ancient 1Gb flash drive.
• Storage medium. The principle here is to have copies in multiple locations and on different storage mediums, e.g. CD/DVD, USB drive, Cloud. And crucially, they need to be regularly verified, and new copies created as old technologies become obsolete and new ones become available.

It's all doable though, not doing it because of "issue of money" is ridiculous, on multiple fronts.

Proof of Concept: a snapshot of https://www.ringingforums.org

http://bleaklow.com/www.ringingforums.org/index.html

You'll notice this post isn't present over there :razz:

Needs ~111Mb of disk space, hardly life threatening...

I don't think there is any excuse for not archiving digital copies of documents. The cost and storage space are minimal.

The new policy is to retain very litte, sadly — Alison Hodge

That policy is misguided imo and I have challenged it. If more do so then it can be changed.

What's the best way of us doing that? The current scramble around people's machines to get copies old survey and reports is a perfect case in point - "individual people's hard drives" is not a suitable archive strategy! :scream:

We also have to remember that a lot of the older material is filing cabinets of paper of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Transferring that to digital formats is not quick or cheap to make is usable.

Even with digital, many of us will remember saying that floppy discs were a great low volume cost-effective storage medium. And who now could read one? So even digital has to be kept up to date and the medium kept in safe and secure condtions.

this discussion is about preserving information that's already in digital form, not digitising paper records, which would be a separate effort. But in any case https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/old-ringing-books/old-books-menu.html shows that it's perfectly possible to digitise paper without vast expense.

And yes, I've already said that a key part of digital archiving is copying the content onto new storage formats as they become available. But that's really not hard - it took me around 20 mins of fiddling to figure out the best set of options for the 2 commands I needed to archive this forum and push it to cloud storage, cloud storage which costs me nothing. In fact I've just re-mirrored it, there's no reason why it couldn't be done automatically every day, with zero effort after the initial setup is done.

There's no justification for not archiving digital data related to ringing.

I have got a USB floppy drive and a USB CD drive just in case. A problem I have had is the current software not reading old files;an issue that John has mentioned.

this discussion is about preserving information that's already in digital form, not digitising paper records, which would be a separate effor — John de Overa

What we are creating now is in digital form, but a lot of the recent (in historical teams) is on paper, and could end in a skip when the person who currently has them dies or downsizes. It took several years of chasing to get the records of one society recovered from the loft of a former secretary, and a lot of the CC Education Committee papers I archived were only on paper.

And of course if we ever were to digitise that sort of material, there wouldn't be much point unless we had secure, long-term digital archival in place already...

Both @John de Overa and @A J Barnfield have mentioned the software issue. I can remember putting up a paper about this thirty-odd years ago. Always include in the data set an ASCII (these days Unicode is probably OK) version of the text. For preference always use open software, closed proprietary software will lock you out, for instance prefer LibreOffice to Microsoft Word. Spreadsheets should have a comma-separated file dumped out. I'd also be very wary today of the temptation to "file and forget" in the cloud, you own the data but if the servers are inaccessible (bankruptcy, policy change ...) then your data is effectively lost.

We were looking at some family photos yesterday, some of them 50 years old or more. I wonder how many family photos being taken on smartphones today will be viewed by our ancestors in 50 years' time?