[obol] archives?

[Joel Geier]

Paul & All,

Thanks for narrowing down the questions and clarifying which "county
archives" effort you meant. Hopefully my effort to address your
additional/broader questions will still be useful to birders who are
less familiar with the resources that are presently available.

Below are some further notes on your three specific questions about:
 1. Old (pre-2002) OBOL archives,
 2. Matt Hunter COOT project, and
 3. Margaret LaFaive's OBOL filing project.
Unfortunately these will not be complete answers, but at least will get
us on the road toward finding complete answers. I hope that others can
fill in some of the gaps.

1. The question of pre-1999 (or make that, pre-2002) OBOL archives is
primarily one for OSU's listserv maintainers. There was not a "new"
OBOL, just new listserv software on OSU's server.

I dimly recall that the question about past archives came up shortly
after OSU made the switch. Here is that same question again, six years
later. Perhaps someone who's handy with the new OBOL archives could
search for that thread about old OBOL archives, and refresh our
collective memory about what was said on this topic, six years ago.

As Paul is well aware, but perhaps others on this list are not, there is
no birding organization behind OBOL. This is just an e-mail list that is
hosted by Oregon State University, and hence is subject to the whims of
OSU's listserv gurus. We've been fortunate to have a series of
individual birders: Greg Gillson, Trent Bray, and Doug Robinson
(apologies since I seem to be forgetting one or two others), who have
served as list administrators. However none of them ultimately has
control over what happens to the OBOL list or its archives.

The people who could best answer Paul's question about the older OBOL
archives are most likely not birders at all, but OSU's listserv gurus.
Perhaps Greg or Doug could pry an answer out of them.

My hunch -- and it is nothing more than a hunch -- is that the OBOL
archives produced by the older listserv software are not compatible with
the new software. So the old archives are likely sitting in the great
digital dustbin of "legacy" data -- perhaps ultimately recoverable, but
perhaps not for free or anytime soon.

If by some chance someone reading this thread took the time to download
the older archives, one month at a time, please contact me. It should be
possible to post these as downloadable files on the OFO website, so that
they'll at least be accessible in that form. I may have a few of these
myself, but certainly not the complete set. 

2. I partly addressed the question about the COOT project archives: Matt
Hunter took this website down, around 2003 or so (I recall it was around
the time that /Bird of Oregon: A General Reference/ was going to press).
At the time, Matt brought up the possibility of passing on a copy of the
files to OFO. If so, they could be sitting in a box of CDs, still
waiting for someone to find time to pull out the still-useful parts and
post them on the web. There are several people to ask, so I'll pursue
this.

3. Margaret LaFaive's efforts to file OBOL postings by county were
indeed heroic. She stopped doing this about 6 or 7(?) years ago, since
it was getting to be a huge task for one person.

At the time I had some discussions with her about supporting this
effort, and spreading the workload around to other volunteers, using
www.birdnotes.net as a web-based filing platform. However, as a
"sightings" database rather than a "postings" database, birdnotes did
not really provide the right set of tools.

The "digest digestion" software that I described toward the end of my
"exhaustive" posting yesterday is, in large degree, my own attempt to
carry Margaret's project forward, into a format that would allow more
flexible means of searching for past reports. But, like Margaret, I
found this task to be rather exhausting for one individual. It could be
resumed with help, as I outlined yesterday.

I don't know what's become of Margaret's files from the earlier years of
OBOL. It would be good to ask Margaret. I would hope that she's kept
copies of these, which could perhaps be brought over to OFO's current
website to make them accessible.

Happy birding,
Joel

--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis