Digging about the electronic dustbins
I notice that the following ACEC National Conference websites have gone, leaving behind perhaps less than a fossilised bone or two.Each new website has gone as .info websites are only temporary. Perhaps 'deleted' during some housekeeping or recognised that the resources are mirrored elsewhere.
CEGSA http://www.acec2004.info (nothing) Contents at ASH
TASITE http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au/acec2002 (empty directory) Contents at ASH
ICTEV http://www.ictev.vic.edu.au/acec2000 (nothing)
With a proud record spanning 27 years of running National Conferences, it would be a sad form of electronic vandalism to collectively discount the value of this past body of work, resigning it to obscurity and the electronic dustbin.Graciously, some material is available from the Professional Association project by David Potter on the Aussie School House server and a bit more from the way-back machine at Archive.org. The rest is probably scattered about on old hard disk drives, cd-roms in desk drawers and dusty proceedings on shelves.
There is merit in having a permanent home for collections of conference resources posted. Hard disk storage is now quite cheap and the Internet traffic is probably only ever going to be incidental. Users that cite resources to this collection should be able to confidently quote a link that does not evaporate when a subject association that hosted an event moves on to new projects. There is also merit in working gradually backwards to archive and publish all the past conference resources before they are lost in the dark depths of time. Even old copies of resources made with WordStar or WordPerfect for the very old conferences can be easily converted to PDF and OpenDocument format files (.odt .odp etc ) with OpenOffice.
We recognised this problem last year with the VITTA subject association, recovering nearly all the original conference material into the previous decade and published this back on-line (Thanks to the splendid work by Donna of CC). I am still in awe of the pioneering work by Margaret Lawson who cut the code for the first VITTA website and conference pages right back in 1995, probably with a simple text editor. Especially when we remember that Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) had only just moved from CERN to formed the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and agree on some decent standards for HTML back in October 1994!
Having thus scratched our marks onto the back of our cave world, we can then move outside to explore a very different conference space outside that embraces an interactive future of podcasts and weblogs.
CEGSA http://www.acec2004.info (nothing) Contents at ASH
TASITE http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au/acec2002 (empty directory) Contents at ASH
ICTEV http://www.ictev.vic.edu.au/acec2000 (nothing)
With a proud record spanning 27 years of running National Conferences, it would be a sad form of electronic vandalism to collectively discount the value of this past body of work, resigning it to obscurity and the electronic dustbin.Graciously, some material is available from the Professional Association project by David Potter on the Aussie School House server and a bit more from the way-back machine at Archive.org. The rest is probably scattered about on old hard disk drives, cd-roms in desk drawers and dusty proceedings on shelves.
There is merit in having a permanent home for collections of conference resources posted. Hard disk storage is now quite cheap and the Internet traffic is probably only ever going to be incidental. Users that cite resources to this collection should be able to confidently quote a link that does not evaporate when a subject association that hosted an event moves on to new projects. There is also merit in working gradually backwards to archive and publish all the past conference resources before they are lost in the dark depths of time. Even old copies of resources made with WordStar or WordPerfect for the very old conferences can be easily converted to PDF and OpenDocument format files (.odt .odp etc ) with OpenOffice.
We recognised this problem last year with the VITTA subject association, recovering nearly all the original conference material into the previous decade and published this back on-line (Thanks to the splendid work by Donna of CC). I am still in awe of the pioneering work by Margaret Lawson who cut the code for the first VITTA website and conference pages right back in 1995, probably with a simple text editor. Especially when we remember that Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) had only just moved from CERN to formed the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and agree on some decent standards for HTML back in October 1994!
Having thus scratched our marks onto the back of our cave world, we can then move outside to explore a very different conference space outside that embraces an interactive future of podcasts and weblogs.