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
>