From: Larry R. van der Putte vdputte@Simplex.NL
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 22:04:56
Subject: Timebinder/Dutch fan history
I just found the Timebinder info in WWW. I think it is a good idea.
There are some practical items which could cause some problems, like if everybody is sending the fanzines, notes, books, letters etc to a centain place to be stored, you end up with a large place.
On the otherhand you could ask for compilations etc.
That's more of what we're looking for-developing indexes and pointing people to the places where the old material lives.
Which brings me to an other item:
Two years ago Jaap Boekenstein, a dutch fan researched the history
of fandom in The Netherlands and Belgium quite exstensively. He produced
a 200 page A4 booklet with the title De Kroniek van de drie zusters
der dromen and covers the history of the lowlands from the beginning
to 1992.
I think that this book is a good start on info about dutch fandom. I will have a talk to him next sunday, and see what happens.
With kind regards, Larry van der Putte, PBNF
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From: Rick Waterson ramchip@xnet.com
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 00:54:25
Subject: Fannish History/Archives
I've been doing some light research into fannish history for a Trivia Bowl I'm running at Windycon this year. In reading through Lester Del Rey's book The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976 he mentions that Sam Moskowitz wrote a book about the scism in early fandom that resulted in the formation of the Futarians. I've tried to find a copy in the local library but got the "Sam Who?" treatment. Since I'm new to the Net, I've yet to do any heavy searching for a copy, but I thought you might like to add Moskowitz to your list of fannish history sources. Oh! The book was titled The Immortal Storm.
Laters, Rick
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From: David Langford ansible@cis.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 1994 20:46:16
Subject: Preservation of Fandom
Martin Easterbrook copied your WWW page about this to the Intersection fan room/programme mailing list, and I've printed it out for Greg Pickergill, who has been writing fervently about this kind of thing -- e.g. transcribing old fanzines somehow to CD-ROM before they decay -- in his fanzine Rastus Johnson's Cakewalk. In his case, the spirit is willing but the finances are less than nonexistent.
It sounds an immensely worthy project!
One idea we kicked around a lot at FanHistoricon is to set up a "scanning station" at fan lounges at major SF conventions, especially at Worldcons. We'd see if fans in an area could lend a scanner and a PC for the weekend for scanning in old fanzines in the Fan Lounge (or in Ops, if security is a problem). At the end of the con, you'd wind up with lots of disks of data, and the scanner and PC would return to their original owners. I think Intersection would be an ideal location for a set-up like this. The data could, one day, be put on a CD, but it would at least be digitized until that became financially feisible.
I've been trying to arrange for a full run of Ansible to be electronically available, but the earlier, poorly mimeoed issues are a major pain for scanning. I was reduced to getting volunteers to type in the pre-word-processor issues (before #42), and the volunteers soon got tired. However, a good many issues from #30-odd to the present day are available at ftp.dcs.gla.ac.uk, directory /pub/SF-Archives/Ansible, and new ones are added as they appear.
And at the major SF WWW sites!
Best: Dave
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From: Richard Newsome newsome@panix.com
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 00:14:36
Subject: Fanzine Index
Robert Lichtman (P.O. Box 30, Glen Ellen, CA 95442) informs me that he has a carton of 50 copies of the Fanzine Index -- this carton originally came from the estate of Ron Ellik, I believe -- and he is selling them off for $7 apiece.
Plans for a new edition of the Fanzine Index are now focusing on corrections and additions to the original edition, starting with Bob Pavlat's notes.
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From: Moshe Feder moshe@dorsai.dorsai.org,
GEnie: Moshe.Feder
Date: Tue Sep 20 09:05:17 1994
Subject: Timebinders
If there's anything like a membership to be had in the Timebinders, I certainly want one. If it's just a mailing list so far, I want to be on it.
The intention is for there to be memberships. I think the details on this will be hashed out at FanHistoriCon 2.
Unfortunately, I had no plans to be at Smofcon and given the amount of other travel I anticipate this year (Ditto and Corflu are both major trips, not to mention Worldcon.), I can't add it to my plans. Guess I'll miss FHC 2 as well. Are enough of the participants on the net that we could consider starting a mailing list?
I have a little mailing list (nearly half the attendees of the con had an E-mail address), but it hasn't been very active yet.
As for practical suggestions: Since a moment of inspiration at MagiCon, I've been an advocate of CD ROM as a way of preserving fanzines. We start with the classics and work out from there. Imagine, in a few years, every neo with $25 books for a disk could have a complete run of Hyphen, Oopsla, Lighthouse, you name it, all in a form more lasting than the originals. I believe we can do this sooner rather than later, and should. The labor can be spread throughout the fannish world to the extent that worldcon surpluses will pay for scanners.
I spoke to Brad myself a little last year when I bought the Hugo nominees CD. I've also spoken to the people at NYMUG, who have done 4 CDs now, and to a small CD-ROM publisher who was trying to sell them to me for the book club and expressed some wilingness to offer guidance if I went ahead with a project of my own. I'm convinced that the data collection is doable and that the manufacturing is affordable. The only significant questions are format (We should do both Mac and PC, but can we afford it?), whether the data should be simple images (my reluctant choice right now) or character-based (so it can be indexed), which requires that every page scanned be OCR'd and proofed (Too much work!), and, of course, the editorial question of what should be included. I wasn't anticipating a hypertext approach at this stage - though it would be neat to do it someday - since I wanted to keep this very large job as simple as possible, and hypertext isn't actually essential to the points of preservation and distribution.
So you see, I have been thinking about this. I've also been talking about it. I remember Arnie was quite excited by it when I advocated it at Corflu last year. But I'd be quite happy to have Timebinders take it over and do the work, rather than organizing a stand-alone project myself as I'd been planning. The main thing is that it be done.
Regards, Moshe