What stinks about WW forums

Archiving our knowledge

I think it requries an organization like the New Hampshire guild, who maintain a nice web site of articles detailing some secrets. Now it would be nice to put them into database form, accessible online.

However, based on the number of books I've bought during the last three years and the huge number I haven't bought, there's no real danger of losing the knowledge of neander woodworking any time soon.

Pam

Re: What stinks about WW forums

Adam,

Take a look at the left side where the links are and scroll down, if you haven't gone to full screen all ready. Ellis has already made the first 4 years of Wood Central posts available on CD Rom, up through Nov 2002. I'm sure the next volume will come a lot faster with the increased posting going on now

Re: Archiving our knowledge

So much knowledge has been lost already. We delude ourselves that we are preserving the past. What we know today is a fragment of what was learned and forgotten in the preceding centuries. I think we are in a better position today not to lose what we have but electronic media isn't a permanent solution. Yes it make data very accessable but it is not a reliable resource. These boards provide a convivial meeting place to exchange ideas and to share knowledge but it's no substitute for hands on demonstration and practice. Getting back off my soap box i wonder how much it would cost to set up an indexed reference to the badger pond data? I'm just buying servers to expand the development environment at work and 15K is going to get me a honking CPU and approaching a terabyte of mirrored storage. That�s not a big investment when spread around a large interested community.

Yes

Hello Adam,

there is a short and along answer. The short. For the next years regular producung Cd's will be a solution.

The long answer you are the archive problem isn't solved by electronic media. We have an accessability to data, which was unknown before, but we have have and will have an destroing of data, which is unknown, since the Chinese invented paper. Not that the old didn't forget something. But since it was much work to write something they did choose the material, they wanted to preserve and they did choose the material that was ready for the wastepaper basket.

Admittedly, this process was sometimes chaotic, influenced by wars etc. But on the whole I stand to the point, that we simply didn't how to find and preserve worthy data under the conditions of electronic media.

Christof Hartge.

CD's in my opinionwill only prolong the problem

Interesting, Paul

I think Wayne's short-term solution will be to put his archived messages on disk. Whether or not that's permanent in any relevant sense isn't as important as the fact that, for now at least, those archives will live on as searchable bits and bytes that each of us can own.

The idea of indexing this data is the tough part. I don't know how to do that without a live editor, and the cost is *huge*. But, without it, we're stuck with accessing the information we want through the primitive search function built into the scripts. I'd love to know if there's a better way.

Ellis Walentine, Host

Re: Interesting, Paul

Hi Ellis and all,

First post here. I, like many, am a pond refugee. I would suggest putting these things in PDF format. PDF is cross-platform, anyone can download the newest reader free of charge from Adobe, and is not likely to go away anytime soon, as it is the defacto standard in the publishing industry. Also, PDF files retain the same look as the original documents without requiring everyone to have the fonts. It's the perfect format for archiving to CD or DVD, either for storage in the safe deposit box or for distribution. If you have any questions about PDF and how to implement it with the files you have, please let me know' I'll try to help, and if I can't there is a very active Acrobat (PDF) forum at Adobe filled with experts.

What happens with the message archives...

...is up to Wayne. However he wants to archive them is up to him. As much as I'd like to look after all those messages, it isn't financially or practically feasible. We'll bring over the articles and reviews as soon as we have the server space. I'm still on my old server and you guys have maxed me out in three days. :-)

Hang loose, and keep in touch with Wayne about his message archives. One way or the other, I'm sure they won't be going away.

Ellis Walentine, Host

Re: Interesting, Paul

The main problem is that what you see is not what you get. The messages as you see them on the screen are dynamically generated by a script from a message database. A PDF of that database would have the messages, but probably not in a user friendly form. Ellis or Jeff can correct me if I am wrong, but in order to make use of the data, it requires some type of viewer and search facility.

Indexing and editing (long)

I work for a very large multinational legal publisher. We have indexing departments that spend thousands of hours creating indexes to state legal codes and other products. To index the archives of BP or WC would require reading and tagging every message or at least the first message of every string. That will make your head spin.

On the other hand, having a good search feature is entirely electronic. The search function on this site seems pretty sophisticated in allowing multiple key words and specific date ranges.

The intermediate step of creating an electronic index would take a lot of programming time, but it would be possible. For instance, the program would search for "4" and "Stanley" in the same message and assign that to "Planes - Smoothing". Of course, this would be pretty coarse, but the longer the program, the better the index. Programs like this can be written in Microsoft Word pretty easily. The formatting is harder to do programatically, but my desktop publishing group does this all the time.

Connor

Re: Indexing

That's what we have computers for. It should be fairly easy to take the text (WebBBS stores text, then converts to html when it needs to display), parse the headers, then index the message texts. I'd suggest putting the messages into a database, maybe MySQL can handle it. Would work for your archives, too.

Pam

Re: Indexing

Parsing the headers: A lot of headers don't really tell you what the message is about. Someone would still have to read a lot of the messages or just ignore these.

Also, there has to be an indexing scheme. You can't just use the headers. Someone has to create the program that knows that "My new Diston" and "Western hand saws" go under the same topic heading, but "Dozuki" does not.

Connor