[peterjb]

Ten days before his death, Paul Stevens asked me to remind him what he needed to do to "keep TC, TF & SCR gallivanting, hopping and paddling on for the foreseeable." He was referring to the three zine sites — The Chimaera, The Flea and The Shit Creek Review — at their established web locations. I thought I would just summarize where we stand with these zines and their online status.

All three stopped publishing new issues in the second half of 2011.

Keeping the sites at their original web locations open as long as possible, so that their latest and archived previous issues would remain accessible, was something Paul and I agreed we should try to do.

Their content is also available online (with a few glitches) from a database maintained by the Australian National Library.


Zine sites at their established locations

I manage the web hosting for The Flea and the later SCRs (from Issue 7 on) and I have undertaken to keep these online for as long as I am able.

The earlier SCRs and all of TC are hosted with a different provider on an account that Paul managed. I hope his family will keep that account going (and also the domain names when they come up for renewal), but of course these decisions are now theirs. This is probably not the time to discuss it with them. I expect, though, that Paul would have renewed anything that was expiring in the short term, so I doubt that anything will change soon.

Australian National Library archive

All issues of the three zines are archived in the Australian National Library's PANDORA database. There's a link to the Pandora archive on the home page of each zine site, which is admittedly not a very useful arrangement since you're much more likely to want the link if the zine site isn't there. Apparently there are a few glitches in the Pandora archiving (some pages, even some issues may not work properly). Doubtless the archiving process is automatic and perhaps doesn't fully capture all technical features of a site. It's a very useful fallback which one day may be the best that can be done, but for now I hope we can keep the zines themselves in place.

In case you need them at some stage in the future, the following are the direct URLs for the three zines in the Pandora archive:

THE FLEA: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/123769
THE CHIMAERA: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/90303
THE SHIT CREEK REVIEW: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/90302

Another way to find them is to go to http://trove.nla.gov.au/website/ and enter the zine title in the Search box.

[Catherine Chandler]

Peter,
Thank you so much for this. Sending you a PM.
Cathy

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, Peter, thanks.
Information received and squirreled away.

Nemo

[Uche Ogbuji]

Thanks for the information, Peter. This is an important way to preserve Paul's legacy, and to honor the wonderful work he did on behalf of so many (including me). It certainly makes sense to try to keep the original setup alive at the original hosting setup and URL. I's also good to hear about the preservation efforts of the Australian National Library archive.

Another great resource is The Wayback Machine, from The Internet Archive project. A quick check shows that they have 14 snapshots of The Flea site, starting in 2001 and all the way through its last issue

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.the-flea.com/

There are also decent-at-first-glance archives of SCR

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...k.auszine.com/

And The Chimaera

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...-chimaera.com/

They're pretty good about preserving pages for as long as they can, once archived (it's a not-for-profit group of digital librarians, well-funded by Brewster Kahle and other sources).

In addition, I'd be happy to create a mirror of all three zines, if that's OK. Of course the idea of that, just as of the ANL and Wayback mirrors would be that no one needs to think about them unless something happens to the original locations.

--Uche

[peterjb]

Thanks, Uche. I know about and quite often use The Wayback Machine to access web pages that have gone from their original locations. Re mirror sites and your generous offer to create them... I confess I don't know how they're typically made or how much of the process can be reliably automated. I wonder how it would cope with a site whose internal links (or some of them) use absolute, not relative URLs — as is certainly the case at points in the SCR content. And where a site uses an SQL database application (Issues 7-15 of SCR on WordPress) I assume a fair bit of work might be involved in replicating that.

[Jones Pat]

Thank you, Peter, now....and for all your work on all the journals we've worked on together. I know you are as saddened by this loss as we all are, but it is so typical of you to be back at work trying to preserve the leagacy Paul left us all. Thank you, yet again... for everything...your invaluable role behind the scenes in all of Paul's journals, not to mention your own 14 x 14 . I keep waiting, hoping to hear you ask, "Are you up for just one more 14 x 14 ? I think you know what my answer would be. : )

Be well, my friend,

Pat

[Uche Ogbuji]

Originally Posted by peterjb

Thanks, Uche. I know about and quite often use The Wayback Machine to access web pages that have gone from their original locations. Re mirror sites and your generous offer to create them... I confess I don't know how they're typically made or how much of the process can be reliably automated. I wonder how it would cope with a site whose internal links (or some of them) use absolute, not relative URLs — as is certainly the case at points in the SCR content. And where a site uses an SQL database application (Issues 7-15 of SCR on WordPress) I assume a fair bit of work might be involved in replicating that.

Hi Peter,

Dealing with absolute vs relative links is trivial. The nature of the back end of the site needn't really matter in mirroring. In some cases, if the site uses dynamic scripting that's tied to a database this can be a problem, but I'd be very surprised if that were the case for any of these sites. I just had a look through the code of SCR issue 7 and I see nothing that would be a problem at all. Even the "unmasking" effect is created using simple JavaScript that doesn't require anything that can't be mirrored without further effort.

One of the main ideas of digital preservation is that content is what's important, not the carrier. It's very sad how much original audio we've lost from our cultural heritage not because the content is unreadable but because the details of format and encoding have been lost. Of course in countries without fair use enshrined in law copyright worries compound the issue. But in the case of these zines I can't urge strongly enough that we don't look to preserve the technology used to generate the content (i.e. WordPress) but rather the resulting content. HTML will be useful long after WordPress is as distant a memory as HomeSite.

I'll go ahead and kick off some mirror jobs of the zines, and offer the result for discussion.

[Uche Ogbuji]

OK The first, fully automated run of mirroring is done for The Flea and SCR. I stuck them here:

http://uche.ogbuji.net/mirror/www.the-flea.com/
http://uche.ogbuji.net/mirror/shitcreek.auszine.com/

Those are temporary locations, of course. I can pretty much put them wherever they're useful. I can also create a zip of the site files and give them to whomever might want them.

The main thing is to test that the mirroring worked OK. I just clicked quickly through a bunch of the mirrored SCR issues and they looked fine. The unmasking effect on issue #7 is preserved. If anyone finds any problems with it, please let me know.

--Uche

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Peter.
Thank you, Uche.
Thank you, Paul.

[Rick Mullin]

Thanks Peter.
RM