In Honor of The OTW April Membership Drive - Day 6

Day 6 of my "show don't tell" post of what fandom means to me. To support the OTW and its projects click here to donate or to learn more about the OTW.

Day one is here
Day two is here.
Day three is here.
Day four is here.
Day five is here.

The Interphase calendar #1 theme is "Star Trek Visits the World of Literature" and features the Star Trek characters in various book settings.
The Interphase Calendar #2 theme is "Star Trek Goes to the Movies" and recasts the Star Trek crew as characters in movies.

First up, the cover of the second calendar pays homage to Captain Kirk's "enthusiastic appreciation" of all the alien creatures he encounters. In my mind, Kirk is an equal opportunity seducer, flirting and couch-ing male, female and multi-gendered beings across the universe. In this ironic and snarky vid, others seem to agree.


And to continue the movie theme, Captain "Sam Spade" Kirk in a dapper pin striped suit admires the Fat Man's dingus, while Chekhov is recast in Peter Lorre's role as Joel Cairo.

And the Archivist Angels rejoice

I blogged about it.
The OTW journal tangentially touched on it.
Even The Deutsche Welle noticed it (and had to point out that the French were doing it better)

Less than 1% if Britain's cultural heritage was being preserved - less than what was saved by the monks during the Dark Ages.

But this weekend, the British Library announced that it had cleared legal and technical hurdles and are finally about to begin preserving British websites. It will take them 6 months to capture and archive websites with a .uk domain and from there they will do an annual crawl.

The reason for the delay? For decades Britain operated on an "opt in" basis which required them to obtain permission before archiving public websites. This  reduced their preservation efforts to a meagerly thin trickle. The Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive) follows the Oakland Archive protocols and uses an "opt out" process which allows them to capture first and remove upon request. In the decades it took the British Library to fight their way through the layers of legal bureaucracy, the WayBack machine captured 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (that's 10 petabytes folks) of data.

And on that note, WebCite, Wikipedia's main citation and linkrot prevention tool is still raising funds in order to continue operating.They set up a Facebook page here. And even more amusingly, they created their own fundraising trailer. Be kind - they're coders and geeks and not vidders nor are they PR or fundraising savants. But they've been providing this service to the world  - for free -- for over 10 years and it is a service we desperately need to continue.  You can donate here.

"WebCite Crowdfunding Trailer" (Watch on YouTube)