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