2021 Archive Redo

Build up

For some time now Connor Sanders had been loitering in the background of YSTV, helping in minor degrees with the Computing Team (aka Rhys Milling), and spent much time without role, purpose or officially designated categorisation. Will Stirk, upon seeing this, felt it to become his personal mission to use all the peer pressure he could muster to get Connor on committee. It failed - at first. Then as time went on and Will did some archive things (...he must have done something) Connor took a noble stance and said he'd take on this burden. He would pursue the deep pains of writing text files and moving pieces of paper that proved too strenuous for those before him. Will was, clearly, convinced.

In the AGM of 2021, He rose to Head of Archives as successor of Will Stirk, himself successor of Joseph Wharfe. The state of the archives was in poor condition, with everything - the wikis, the docs, the shelf - all covered in dust, untouched and undocumented. After hours and hours of speeches and debates, the archives nomination speech went as follows: "So I'd like to be head of archives..." - and that was that.

Elected

Archive meetings and libraries

First call of action... Archive meeting: 3am the day of AGM. 3 attendants and no useful material discussed.

Second call of action... Archive meeting 2: a more reasonable time on some more reasonable date. 2 attendants and lots of ideas.

Task 1: Contact the library. Now this sounds like a simple enough task but what you may fail to see is the degree to which bureaucracy and neglect push such simple things into lifelong efforts. However, after a series of emails, the library finally caved, and accepted the deal. Or, really, they accepted right away but just took forever to respond to emails.

Task 2: Bring in the box(es). In order to transport tapes, boxes were needed. And after a long discussion we finally got ONE, for close inspection. It proved to be true and honest, so we ordered some more. Then, following many, many delays we got a delivery of no less than 46 boxes. Cardboard boxes... Big ones. And what else is there for a man to do with such quantity of boxes than found the Archive Fort, as Connor took it upon himself to do.

Task 3: Transport the boxes. This remains in the future so we shall see

Wikis and docs

Now of all the things to fall to the side, the wikis were the more tedious. You may now notice there are sitemaps on these pages - this is no mere accident. In fact it was around 2-3 days of continued pain, getting CategoryTree to work properly and recategorising hundreds of articles, by hand. In the end, we now have 2 wikis that work, are traversable, and are as clean as can be. Thank you Connor.

Now you may also notice that some pages say "this revision does not exist". I have no idea why this happens or why it's there but, as far as I can tell, it always has been. We've had history lost forever on here and sadly we can't get it back.

Moving the boxes

Months have passed since the initial attempt to get this sorted but finally, on October 20th 2021, the tapes are out of the studio. In 40 something cardboard boxes, labelled and organised precisely so we can request exactly the right tapes, our archives have been moved to the library. Next step is digitization - the hard part. But the good thing is we no longer have to wait around for things to be moved; all we have now is a need to get things done as fast as we can.