On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Rob Hudson wrote:
> Chris wrote:
>> I was just wondering if there might be news about the list archives
>> coming back online (or maybe I have the wrong link(s))? Anything I/we
>> can do to help?
>
> Also - is there the possibility of hosting what's currently there in the
> interim for people to access and search themselves?
As mentioned in another piece of email, since September 2012, the list
archives have been hosted here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/origami@lists.digitalorigami.com/
(Sorry, just realized that the list info page changes to reflected
that did not, for some reason, take effect. Will fix that shortly.)
When I'd last written about hosting the archives with the Mail Archive
site, I'd asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to help with migrating
the old data to the mail-archive.com system; I heard back from one
volunteer, but they never followed through (or I lost mail from them,
also possible), and I've been too busy to work on it myself.
It's a big-ish project (and I've since discovered that we may no
longer have the original mail files for everything, which makes it
even more complicated), but if anyone's up for it, they'd earn the
O-list world's gratitude. I include the "job description" below.
Get in touch with me off list if you've got the skills described
below, and have the time/inclination to help!
Anne
--- Stuff to Do to Migrate the Old List Data: ---
(2) someone (*) needs to get in touch with the support team at the
Mail Archive and explain what we'd like to do, namely, at least:
- that we've got 20+ years of old mail that we'd like to
(eventually) submit
- that all this old mail will have been delivered to multiple
hosts over the years as the list as moved between servers
- we want to be really careful about protecting people's email addresses
and ask whether they have any specific
recommendations/warnings/needs for the old data (beyond it needing to
be in mbox format.) http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html has lots of
details, but I think we need actual contact with their tech folks.
(*) said someone needs to, at the very least, understand enough of the
underpinnings of email and networked computing to know about email
structure, mbox mail file formatting, character sets, mime encoding,
and the like.
(3) Someone then needs to play information wrangler, and contact the
previous archivist(s) and get copies of all the old mail; then gather
any mail since the latest archive stopped in 2010 (I have all of that,
myself, plus lots of the past mail if there are any holes.) I can
provide shared networked filespace to facilitate this, if needed, or
we could use Dropbox or its cousins.
(4) Someone (or several someones) need to clean the data and convert
it, as needed, into properly-formatted and -encoded mbox file(s),
including any changes that the Mail Archives folk suggest, as needed.
This could entail scripted or by-hand raw text editing of the files,
and could be rather laborious, but ought to be possible in chunks, and
could thus easily be spread out to suitably capable volunteers. (If
any of it needs to be checked/edited by hand, this means careful use
of a plain-text editor capable of reliably specifying text encodings -
Word and all its ilk are Right Out. This is not really a task for
computing novices, nor for the faint of heart.) I can provide
account-level access to the O-list server machine (which runs Linux)
to facilitate any scripting needs, etc. (We could plop the stuff into
a database, too, if anyone wants to try that path; but I'm not sure
that's worth it unless someone wants to volunteer to go down the
roll-our-own-archive-service route. But I could be wrong, and
persuaded to do almost anything to get this moving!)
(5) Finally, the tidied files all get gzip'd and put online somewhere
(O-list server space happily made available for this) and then we ask
the Mail Archive folks to go upload them.
