I nearly broke out in hives while Conservation Online was down last month. Let me rephrase that: I nearly could not do my job or make any important conservation-related decisions while Conservation Online was down in late July – early August. I made a record of all the “CoOL” things I needed to do in a single morning during this dark period:
- Needed to look up an email on the PADG listserv? Only on CoOL (PADG is hosted by ALA, but sure enough the archives are not available / searchable through the ALA website …)
- Needed to use CoOL’s “Finding People” directory of nearly 10,000 conservation professionals from around the globe? Only on CoOL.
- Needed to do some research about a product we were researching for use in some treatment workflows, and wanted to search across the pretty full scope of conservation lit, discussion groups, and professional output? Only on CoOL.
CoOL is now back up at what looks like a temporary server location. I’m not sure what the current timeline or status re: the move to AIC is as the last update posted on CoOL was on July 14, 2009 . Update: there’s a post on the AIC News website re: CoOL. I’m sure Walter and others are moving heaven and earth to get this singular resource back up and running, but I check the site near daily just to make sure it’s there. So I can work. And so I can sleep.
Today a colleague discovered that the Conserv-O-Grams site and the NPS Museum Handbook, both hosted by the National Park Service, is down. n. I hope this is simply a temporary and passing server issue, but I’m started the gong here — I wish I’d done this for the downtime of Conservation Online — just to show a rally of support for getting that much-needed resource back up and running. On 9/09/09, Conserv-O-Grams is down. If it isn’t back up by tomorrow, info will be posted here on who to contact at NPS to politely inquire about its status and to show support. Update: as of 11:35 a.m. on 9/9/09, both sites are back up. Thank goodness.
September 9, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Hola, amiga. I agree about the deep online need for access to those resources, but let me toot the Connecting to Collections horn and say that because of their Conservation Bookshelf grant I have the NPS Museum Handbook in a couple of nice fat binders, along with a few other great things. A few that I’d like are missing from the bookshelf, like the Paper Conservation Catalog, the NEDCC leaflets, but let me tell you – Print is still useful!
September 12, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Parts of CoOL are now in their permanent home (e.g. albumen, videopreservation) and a very large portion of what was at palimpsest.stanford.edu is now being served cool.conservation-us.org (and palimpsest requests are being redirected there). Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to do and the mailing list archives are unavailable (though the DistList archives and portions of other list archives can be found. Some of the resources are indeed being redirected to a temporary machine (eg JAIC is, at this moment http://206.180.235.133/jaic/
but will ultimately be found at cool.conservation-us.org. Right now my attention is mostly on getting the DistList back in operation, something for which a number of relatively minor–but nonetheless difficult to work out–technical details having to do with moving from an AIX and Solaris 8 environment to a Linux environment/ Similary, the new machine has a very different approach to mail than I’m used to, so there are days were half the morning is spent trying to track down a single line in a config file that turns out to be critical path.
John Burke and the ISP have been working very, very hard to get things working, but the fact remains that CoOL is a lot more complex beast than most people realize and there’s still a great deal of work ahead.
While I’m sorry that CoOL’s absence has caused you difficulty, you can probably imagine that knowing that is also very encouraging and motivates us to get this party (re)started.
I do apologize for not providing progress updates, but when there’s a choice between writing “we’re working on ….” and actually working on it, the choice is pretty easy. (same goes for proofreading, so if there are embarrassing typos above, please excuse)
onward
w