Archiving forum material

[Don Ricardo]

This is a question about the forum for Mark T and Kris as administrators/moderators, but the answer will probably be of interest to others as well:

Is there a mechanism in place for securely archiving the material posted on the forum for posterity?

The reason I ask is that there has been a tremendous amount of valuable material posted – historical photos, photos of different makes and models of vans (including home-built which are just as important), bits of social history, technical bits and pieces which people have discovered, etc – and this information is continuing to grow. Over time it is building in to a real treasure trove which could well be of use to current or future historians, those interested in social trends or engineering techniques. You never know – one day there may be somebody who writes a PhD thesis on the history of caravanning in Australia…Dr Mark T, Professor Reddo, Associate Professor Cobber perhaps?

Seriously though, I do think it is important that the material on the forum is preserved for future access, and is not subject to a computer crash or other electronic mishap. Maybe some mechanism is already in place, but I just thought I would ask.

Don Ricardo

[Deleted]

Hi Don

The problem of vanishing photos lies with "photobucket". All photos stored there are put there by forum members.
If they ( the member) decide to remove them from photobucket then they ( the photos) also dissapear from the forum thread and we are left with a little red cross in a white box where the photo use to be..
If a subscribee gets a " dirty on" or for what ever reason desides to unsubscribe they can delete all of their photos from photobucket and leave the forum threads looking like a patchwork quilt... which is exactly what your concerns seem to be... good info vunerable to being lost for ever.

Photobucket has caused a lot of pain for newcommers .. me included...wanting to post pictures to this forum of their pride and joy(s).
I have seen much better systems but i am unsure about what needs to be done to get over onto those systems. May be difficult to transfer all photos in all sections from one program to another. It would still be the responsibility of each of us to go back over each post with photos in it an repost to the new system.

A big job in anyones language.

A good system i was shown at work the otherday is "piccasa2" . I think someone like "Jim" has mentioned this or a similar program some time back.

The only way we would lose any written text would be by moderator editing,and to thier credit they have not wiped out any valueable info that i am aware of.

Regards
Reddo

[cobber]

Darn good question Don,

I have often thought along the same lines.
I don't understand who owns "photobucket" or "proboards" but if either of them drop dead tomorrow who says the facility continues to exist

A little while back we had an entrepreneur who put many of our photos onto a cd and was selling them for his own miserable gain.
Is that the sort of thing that has to be done, I'd hate to be the one trying to sort the "drivel" out from all the good stuff

Cobber.

[Deleted]

Good point again Cobber.

Also be interesting to see how much of the so called "self professed experts information" could be classed as gospel as well. May well be a good percentage of fibs and drivel disgiused as technical information ( also known as "assumptions") amongst that too.

A lot of what we put up here is based on old articles scrounged from newspaper clippings and magazine articles etc. We would need to be mindfull of the pitfalls of making assumptions from those articles and the credibility of the author/editor before we started building any sort of reference library.
Much bigger job sorting that out than what it would be syphoning off the drivel . or it may be simple task of cut and paste in amongst the "good' bits which would leave you with the sort of stuff some of the listees crave.

In the meantime we can only use info supplied by contributors as a "loose guide to caravans built pre 1970 in Australia".



Reddo ;D

[sportsman 1]

Hi all,

This is the sort of thing I was getting at in my thread re Library of Literature, I figure if we can get all the literature, brochures, photos, etc or copies of whatever in 1 (or 2) places it will be easily accessed and preserved for the future.

May involve some work but I am sure it must be worth the effort.

Cheers,

Leigh.

[Geoff & Jude]

hi don, cobber and reddo

i just did a little test and as a matter of interest, any photos posted on the forum can easily be copied and pasted into any other document (eg word or adobe reader) for future reference. the same goes for any text on the forum.

once done, it is independent of either photobucket or the forum and can be referenced if either or both collapse.

the text can easily be re-pasted to the forum, but the photos need to go through another programme similiar to photobucket.

geoff 'n jude

[will and Lyn]

gidday Reddo and other enthusiasts
Picasa is a photo management system owned by google I have used it for 6 to7 years because it is easy and better than any other available
google aquired it around 2 years ago and made it free to download
there is to much to mention of what it can do for photos
and it also has a sister called Hello that is a photo transferance system where photos can be swapped instantly with no download time if it is stored in picasa
so if i wanted to send 30 photos to reddo if he had hello it would transfer in a matter of seconds
other capabilities im not sure of but perhaps someone that has more technical nouse than me can look into it
to download them both takes only 3 to 4 minutes totally free of charge
there is also many groups like skype that are free and you can talk with whoever logs on I have it on other forums Im sure you are all aware of them

Will
ps I download my photos to cd now regularly

[will and Lyn]

Gidday Kaybee
when the forum was upgraded about 12 months ago or more I was lost in the change I have a standard password that I have used for everything when we tried to log on it never recognized my password
kept saying there is a member with that password and would not let me in the pooh-Bah tried to correct but even he failed
so I cracked a hissy fit after 1000 posts and stayed a guest
thats the story to this day it will not let me in with our original password
so there take that and this and this too
I wasn t going back to being a junior woodchuck not for no one
so email me on [e-mail]

Will
known sometimes as The gnome to my close friends
And to not so close friends just gnome

[Don Ricardo]

Thanks for your thoughts everyone. It is a complex problem in the sense that - as Reddo says - the photos are under the control of the person who posts them via Photobucket, and I presume this would also be the case with another system such as Piccasa2 or whatever? In fact the same applies to text as well, because an individual correspondent can, if they choose, delete all their posts, and I seem to remember somebody saying a while ago that they had done just that.

I also worry about the same thing as Cobber - if Photobucket or Proboards closed up shop tomorrow we would all be in limbo. For this reason I was hoping Mark or Kris could tell us if Proboards provide some sort of archiving system - something like taking a regular snapshot of the current content of the forum and saving it securely somewhere, exactly like an archiving system works on an individual PC.

If there isn't a system like that in existence then perhaps we need to consider the options suggested by Sportsman and Geoff 'n Jude. I have used Geoff 'n Jude's technique for some material on the forum - I hasten to add for my own private interest and research only, not for any commercial reason - but the problem is the volume if we wanted to archive a lot of material that way. Perhaps we should be looking at Sportsman's idea of a library?

There is no doubt, as Reddo points out, that you wouldn't want to save everything that gets posted, but there is just so much valuable material here. Reddo comments that some of the information is possibly unreliable because it is based on supposition, third hand facts etc. I'm not particularly worried about that, because the forum allows us to crosscheck our information against information provided by others. (A couple of times my statements have been corrected by somebody else, and I'm grateful for that.) Besides that, if the information does eventually get used by a social historian or similar, they are used to dealing with 'facts' that are tainted by the passing of time or inaccurate memory.

Perhaps what we need is a dedicated archivist - anyone offering? Sportsman...??

Don Ricardo

[Don Ricardo]

As a postscipt to my last post:

I have just checked out the Proboards website, and there is quite a bit of discussion re archiving there. From a quick look around, there seem to be some mechanisms available, and I tried one on this thread, but only got so far. It obviously needs a bit more time and thinking power than I've got at the moment! Anyway - worth exploring by the look of it.

Don Ricardo

[will and lyn]

;D
gidday vin van peeple
we are revisiting the past here
2 years ago I suggested the same thing as archiving and a vin van register to keep track of the restorations and any vans that were found for future reference
and the world fell in
every body basically said the reason we are so successfull is because we are not a club
remember that Reddo and Jailbar and Kaybees and pooh bah and the list goes on
I think cobber was the only one that thought it had merit
and I must say They did convert me
once someone starts to do work so to speak its a commitment
then it requires organization
unless there is someone who wants to seriously take it on there shoulders and do the work
remembering that there is a core group of around thirty people
who keep this forum functioning at any one time unless some are prepared to share the load over a period of time and also because of the distances between us all it then becomes an organizational nightmare
after saying all that I still like the idea of retaining any thing that has been gathered so far as there has been a lot of lost

information in the archives particularly photos of restorations
I ask the Question why some posts missing / and others not
do we have a retention limit with a random overflow or do they just go missing for reasons we do not know about
maybe someone may be able to find out
I know that 1 month on a daily basis in a heat wave doing up elvis was bloody hard work and I have lost most of those photos from the computer crash and when I go into our records at least half of that restoration is lost in there
WHY?

Will
I really want to gnome Why?

shutup Reddo
you did this to me I cant even stay serious on a serious subject

[cobber]

Me again

I think Don got close to the money in his first post when he suggested somebody might like to do a thesis on the "History of Caravaning in Australia".

Among my other interests I am an Arthur Upfield fan. There have only been two attempts to write a biography on him over the years, neither of them much good. Then just last year a bloke did a 296 page thesis on Upfield for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University, the amount of research he did, the contacts he made, the material that was made available to him is amazing, it deserves to get published.

Back to caravans.
There have been a few books written on the history of English caravans, even a few in recent times, but I don't know of any that comprehensively study Australian caravans and who made what when, and how many models they had and what materials were used and who bought them out etc. etc.

Books written by people like Keith Winser & Jack Pollard are now part of the history that needs to be updated.

WHAT WE NEED IS A GOOD OLD FASHIONED BOOK, with pictures in it, that we can put on our book shelf, that we can take to bed and read and show to other people and refer to over and over....yeah !

And the pictures and information on this forum forms the basis of such a book, all we need is the demand for such a book....and an author.

Cobber.

[Deleted]

Gotcha Cobber

I will put it on my list of 'to do's " when i retire.
Meanwhile we can all cuddle our keith Windser books and look forward to next years vintage caravan calender. That is as near to a book as we can get at the moment.
Perhaps some uni student will pick up the batton and run with a "History of caravans built up to 1970 in Australia " book.

On a serious note ....i have constant battles with people at work over new computer programs that slow processes down or... even worse.. loose a full days work if there is a glitch in the u beaut e system.
The written word will be around long after these electronic time wasting devices are all gone.

Nothing like a good book i say.

reddo

[cobber]

Gronk,

That's part of the problem, there is no big demand for such a book in Australia, nobody will make money out of such a book.

Last year I tried to get a Calender publishers interested in a "Vintage Caravan" calendar...no market for it they said.

If it wasn't for the dedication to the hobby and head bashing extortionist tactics of Mark & Papa rartzi we wouldn't have had one this year.

So I think you would have to have somebody like the caravan industry sponsoring it. It is as I said with the Upfield thesis, the people who gave him access to personal material and information was astounding, once they knew he was gathering the material to put it in one place to make a coherent story from it all.

Col...I have vague recollections that you picked up a book along the lines of what we are talking about last year at some show or other, what was that about ?


Cobber.

[sportsman 1]

Hi all,

I am also heavily involved in a couple of car clubs as well as having a love for old caravans. I am also a bit of a literature fan in that I am always reading something. I am librarian for one of the clubs I am in which gives me some insight into what may be needed by way of archiving stuff.

However I am a definite bunny when it comes to the 'putory thing! I know how to buy and sell on evilbay, look on here and talk to you folks and browse the web, but thats about it for me. I am sure I can learn lots more though (I learn something new every day).

I am willing at this stage to put my hand up to gather and store any printed type material that anybody cares to send me on V V's, catalogue and distribute copies thereof as required and carry out research if needed. Obviously anything that is collected will remain the property of either the sender or the forum.

If I can get some help re computorising same that would be of benefit also.

I have only been on here since November, I would have thought only full members would be eligible to hold a position such as 'archivist' if that is what the position is, I will leave this in the hands of Mark and Krisbee to have a think about.

Kaybee, by the way it seems you and Krisbee are fairly active in here and as you are in Croydon and I am in Lilydale perhaps if this does go any further we could meet to discuss how it might all come together.

Cheers to all in V V land,

Leigh.

[exocet]

I think it is a fantastic idea and agree with JBJ that it should be done for history"s sake and if someone is clever enough to get it together go for it! My gut feeling is it would be of quite a bit of interest from the general public. In 2006 i bought a calender of vintage caravans from a shop that only sold calenders and it was one of their most popular, and then of course in 2 years ABC's Collectors has featured no less than 3 Vintage vans and told me they would be happy to feature more in the future, perhaps next time when you all gather at Coledale as an example? By the way where is Coledale? cheers exocet

[belinda]

Currently the vintage van movement has two "faces" - Marks original page and this discussion board.

Maybe it now needs a third "face" more like Mark's page - a generally informative page that is controlled by one person and summarises the best info that members contribute. This would stay smaller than the discussion board, and so should be easier to back up regularly in case the server went bye-byes.

It's hard to explain, but the model I'm thinking of is the British site www.teasmade.com/. (If you think vintage vans are a quirky interest it is nothing on Teasmades). Like vintagecaravans.com, this is a webpage started by an enthusiast and now represents a knowledge base that is building on members' contributions.

If you look at the site, there is a great "model page" with a thumbnail of all the different types. More info is available if you click on a picture. Our discussion board already has a similar amount of info, with multiple examples of many models of vans - Dons, Sunliners, Atlantics, Properts and others. It's just that ours isn't arranged.

Teasmade.com also has a community of "Teasmaniacs" helpful people with specific expertise. If you think about it, we have the equivalent. Mark is great for info on Dons, Humpty is the Sunliner man and Ray is a good one to ask about Properts.

I agree that a book probably doesn't have a market (yet). Also, considering how rapidly this interest is growing and how new stuff seems to surface every week, any book would be way out of date even before it hit the coffee table. Maybe the ultimate answer will still be electronic, just in a different/parallel format.

Having said all that, I think I'll go have a cup of tea. The question is, which of the five Teasmades will I give a burl ....?

[sportsman 1]

Hi all,

If you look at my original post in 'library of literature' I suggested either 1 contact or 1 for each popular make. We have model mentors in one of my car clubs so when a new member wants details, etc of their car they can contact the relevant "expert".

I would be very happy to see this eventuate if we have people willing to put their hands up for such a position.

For all the folks who own one-offs or something with a low production/survival rate the other information can be given to any willing person to co-ordinate.

I for one would be willing to cover Sportsmans or Teardrops in general, as well as the orphans if necessary.

Interesting point- Not one reply to my original thread, is it me or just I didn't put forward my point of view very well???

Cheers to all,

Leigh.

[Geoff & Jude]

Hi Exocet,

Coledale is in NSW on the south coast - I guess the nearest notable town would be Wollongong.

Last year it made the local TV news two nights in a row & it seems like a lot of the local newspapers had articles in the as well.

Caravan & Motorhome mag were there & had features in the last two issues, thanks to Cobber, so it seems to be getting well known as a successful Vint Van get together.

Last year there was a calendar out promoting this site & it was a ripper. I beleive there will be another one this year, so keep a look out for it.

Jude & Geoff

[cobber]

G'day Leigh,

There's nothing special about you mate...most of us get ignored here from time to time

Many of us have our own personal V V libraries and share the information there in, either by copying and posting on the forum or, if there is fear of copyright infringement, sending it to the interested party via a personnel message. I won't name the individuals who have done this because it has been done many times by many people.

I don't think the centralized repository for books would work because we are not a club, and we are not restricted to one area of Australia, books would be floating back and forth all over the country.

As for having one expert on a make that can be contacted to get information....you only have to ask the question on the forum and you can get answers from a multitude of "experts".

However...this thread started off by trying to overcome the fear of losing all the information that we have accumulated on this site already. Don's suggestion that we inspire somebody to do a thesis on "The History of Caravans in Australia" sounds good to me. My suggestion that we get somebody to write a book on the same subject wouldn't work because it wouldn't be commercially viable.

Cobber.

[hwyman]

Hi All;

It's nice being ignored from time to time... it keeps us level-headed. ;D ;D ;D

Hwyman

[Thanks Belinda]

Hi! I found your kind comments about Teasmade.com when checking out who was linking to my site. You might like to know that for a while last year I tried to modernise my site with a full blown article management system... but everyone hated it! I had to go back to the original format about a month later with my tail between my legs. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your interest and wish you well with your website ideas! Keep it simple and friendly, and keep everything together - it works for me. Good luck!