Thanks Kevin and Eric for your replies. Good areas to investigate. Quick question for Eric: Are the lists you archive ones that you host or are some of them simple ones you subscribe to? Thanks again! Nathan On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Jul 19, 2011, at 10:13 AM, Nathan Tallman wrote: > > > Has anyone worked on preserving a Listserv (proprietary) archive of > > messages? What can one do, other than make sure that the server hosting > the > > list in question is backed up (LOCKSS style, with geographic separation) > and > > kept up in good working order? The archive search interface does a pretty > > good job at access, but what about true long-term preservation? > > > Mr Serials is dead. Long live Mr. Serials! [1, 2] > > For just less than twenty years I have been interested in the preservation > of mailing list messages. I started doing this by creating a bogus Unix > account (Mr. Serials), hacking together a set of procmail recipes, and > funneling the result to Hypermail. Every year, between Christmas and New > Years, I copy the archived mbox files to near line storage, and just this > past year I have started migrating my older near line storage formats to > newer ones. I've never done the LOCKSS thing with this content. That sounds > like a cool idea. Hypermail provides me with an interface to the content. I > index the whole lot with the venerable Swish-e application, and access to > the index is through, believe it or not, SRU. > > In short, I believe I have applied the principles of librarianship to > mailing list content. > > [1] Mr. Serials - http://bit.ly/q8v9Wo > [1] His collection - http://bit.ly/qhBNjT > > -- > Eric Lease Morgan >