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To: chairman-itsub (at) one-name (dot) org Dear Ken, I am writing in response to the invitation on Kirsty's From the Chairman's Keyboard page of the latest Journal. I already have in early draft form an article for submission to the Journal with the provisional title The web site is the one-name study and this proposal derives from it. In the 24 years I have been a Guild member I have seen digitisation and the use of the Internet transform genealogy, one-name studies and the Guild. A constant issue for Guild members has been the preservation of their one-name research data and results. The Guild has made valiant efforts to address this issue through its Archiving policy for one-name study material and schemes such as The Guild Electronic Archive; Members web pages (profiles); Lodging digital copies of your ONS study material with the Guild; and Donating "orphaned" ONS study material to the Guild (paper archives). None of the Guild's projects however can quite do what I would like to see for the continuation of the Cree One-Name Study. This Study is now fully digitised and accessible via the Internet (at www.cree.name). For me the web-site is the one-name study. As I move into my seventies I am increasingly drawn to considering how this body of research, the cumulative result of years of work by many researchers, might survive me. Having embraced the “paperless office” by committing everything to the web site, have I left the whole project vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time, my hosting company and my executors? What is for sure is that my hosting company, reliable as it is, will pull the plug on the web site as soon as payments cease. At present these amount to £110 a year. I have considered setting up a small trust of, say three trustees, with funds from which there would be enough interest to pay the fees. But with interest rates hovering around 2.5% it would need a fund of around £5000. And I don’t know of anyone who is committed enough to carry out this trust. It wouldn’t matter too much if the web site were no longer being developed, although it would be better if it were - the site itself includes full instructions on the procedures. What is important to me is that it should at least survive as a web site accessible to the world - not just a CD in the Guild’s archives. The Cree One-Name Study web site occupies 350 MB of web space. However the hosting fee pays for a maximum size of web site of 50,000 MB - enough for over 100 similar web sites. If, say, 99 other people were to share the hosting fee, the cost of financing it indefinitely would be reasonable. Who could oversee such a project? It needs to be an organisation whose aims include the preservation of such data, an organisation that will itself exist well into the foreseeable future, an organisation that we can trust to look after the data. My own hosting company allows me to create up to 100 sub-domains and I expect most ISPs are similar. It has the facility to allocate the subdomains to separate users each with their own password-protected access to their subdomain and able to upload files just as if it were their own domain. Once I set up such a sub-domain for a user I have nothing else to do as the overall manager of the web site. I would be very happy to move my web site from www.cree.name to a subdomain address such as cree.one-name.net run under the Guild’s auspices. Members taking part would share the costs by each using a subdomain of a single web site, the cost would be around £1 a year each. But if each were to make a once-only payment of £100, the fund of £10,000 would yield at least £200 a year in interest and the site could be maintained indefinitely. I would continue to develop, edit and maintain the Cree One-Name Study site as long as I am able. After that, the site would remain as a resource for Cree researchers indefinitely, and if someone came along who was willing to administer it they could join the Guild and do so. All the Guild would need to do when I die or cease membership is to add a standard front page to my site to explain the situation. I would like to propose that the Guild create a web-site (or an area of its web site) which can act as a web-host for members' web sites. If the Guild Committe agrees to such a project, I am willing to take the lead in researching its feasibility, setting it up and managing it through the early stages, in collaboration the IT Subcommitte and other Guild Officers. I look forward to hearing from you. Best Wishes,
Mike Spathaky |