Historium
A project created by John Cholewa (who also largely handled the sf4m.org wiki) which is essentially just a big directory tree on the web server at [1] which contains scans of photographs and records as well as saved copies of items on the Internet relating to the history of the Forum. The essential idea here is that:
- Physical objects, like LOG books, will be lost to the ravages of time
- Online services can last a long time, but eventually capitalism eats them
- Individual user pages similarly disappear
- Even apps on this website, such as the defunct phpBB message board and the photo gallery that was used for a time, have eventually become unusable due to security upgrades on the server. The data still exists in sql files, but they're incredibly difficult to browse though, even for someone who can use them.
Files are generally in open formats to increase their chances of usability in the distant future. Anything not requiring images or formatting are likely to be ASCII text files. Scanned items are almost certainly PDFs. Scanned items with additional annotation tend to be, for convenience, ODT (Open Document Text, zip files containing ASCII xml files which are openable in pretty much all modern word processors but which could still be parsable even long after the format itself is out of common use). Captioned images are also ODTs.
History
The first files were uploaded in 2006. These were the Forum Omnipedia, a web page not on sf4m.org created by Jon Griffin which catalogued a large amount of information about the Forum from the late nineties and perhaps early noughties. The information therein formed the basis for the SF4M wiki.
In June 2009, scans of the Forum LOG books started being uploaded.
In 2024, a larger-scale project began. The Timeline, a repository initially of Meeting Notes (or Minutes) started being acquired. This was eventually expanded from items found on the Internet (via Livejournal, the Forum's e-mail list's archive page at groups.io, the Forum's Facebook group, and the sf4m.org sql database) to anything interesting, including image captures from the aforescanned LOG books and pictures found on the Internet.