Save the Drabbles

[tinturtle]

I spent part of the evening fretting about the loss of fanworks, and then, more productively, trying to make sure that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Fan Fiction Archive, The Chrome and Gunmetal Madhouse (MFU), The Professionals Circuit Archive, and The Hatstand (Pros) are all backed up to the Wayback Machine. Someone had clearly done a thorough pass over The Circuit Archive, but MFU Archive, Chrome and Gunmetal, and The Hatstand contained quite a bit of material that had not been collected yet, so it was a worthwhile effort. I'm certainly glad that MFU's File 40 had a nearly complete back-up when it went down.

Comments

[tinturtle]

There's so much Pros out there, and I hate to think of it being lost... though the archaeologist in me knows that everything eventually is... *sighs*

It is sad but true. "Look on my fanfic, ye mighty, and despair."

I thought the Wayback Machine picked up sites automatically via internet scans using bots, I didn't know it could be specifically used by people. How do you do that? Is there a page with instructions? There's probably a few personal Pros sites out there that could do with backing up in that case!

I think the Wayback Machine may use crawlers as well, but users can submit pages for archiving using this form. If you have an Internet Archive account, you can archive the submitted page as well as all the pages it links to (but not the ones they link to). I got an account tonight so that I could work on backing up the fanfic archives.

I think a few of us have copies of the Circuit and Hatstand archives backed up using save-websites software too, so it's actually on our computers. And ProsLib effectively backs up alot of Pros fic too, as our main off-line archive (huge shout-out to our brilliant hagsrus archivist!), but I do like hearing that more people are backing things up, so yeay, go you! *g*

I have most of the stories from all the archives I mentioned on my hard drive, mostly because it makes it much easier to search them. (This applies to the Pros archives especially, since The Hatstand doesn't have a search function and the one at The Circuit Archive is broken.) It's good that others have downloaded them, too. As you said, more redundancy is better. The Wayback Machine also has the advantage that anyone who came across a broken link to a Pros fic could try to find it there, whether they are connected to other fans or not.

ETA - it was actually your mention of drabbles that caught my eye especially, as I think people have often posted them but never backed them up to an archive (me included...)

Hum. I just chose "save the drabbles" because its parallel to "save the whales" amused me, but maybe an actual Save the Drabbles campaign is needed.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the form - I've always known the Wayback Machine as just a crawler... Philosophically, knowing that people can save websites etc. by application is interesting from the pov of skewing history to that of people who have the time/inclination to save sites, especially if that's not widely known (like Fanlore being hugely skewed to American views of fandom, for instance, because that seems to be where most of the input comes from, so that the alleged history of Pros is very much from an American pov in the vast majority of articles I've read there). "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

since The Hatstand doesn't have a search function and the one at The Circuit Archive is broken
I think your Circuit problem might have been a glitch - I've been using it without problems, and just tested it now. It's working for me! That said, it's a limited search function anyway, because it doesn't search the fics themselves.

If you've not already got the ProsLib CD (have we talked about that before?! I'm sure we must have!) then I'd recommend it for searches - as far as I know it contains all the Circuit/Hatstand fic (because the archivists worked together), and additional fic from after Circuit/Hatstand stopped archiving.

Drabbles are a funny thing - they've spread out to have a thousand different meanings. When I came into Pros they were defined as complete stories written in exactly 100 words. But people have used them as 100 words of story-fragment, and expanded them to double--triple-etc. "drabbles", and used them to mean "roughly 100 words" or "a short fic" or "a fragment of a fic"...