Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Archiving 20 years of online content
▻https://veronneau.org/archiving-20-years-of-online-content.html
Last Spring at work I was tasked with archiving all of the digital content made by Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a student union federation that was planned to shut down six months later.
Now that I’ve done it, I have to say it was quite a demanding task: ASSÉ was founded in 2001 and neither had proper digital archiving policies nor good web practices in general.
The goal was not only archiving those web resources, but also making sure they were easily accessible online too. I thus decided to create [a meta site](▻https://asse-solidarite.qc.ca) regrouping and presenting all of them.
All in all, I archived:
– a Facebook page
– a Twitter account
– a YouTube account
– multiple ephemeral websites
– old handcrafted PHP4 websites that I had to partially re-write
– a few crummy Wordpress sites
– 2 old phpBB Forum using PHP3
– a large Mailman2 mailing list
– a large Yahoo! Group mailing list
Here are the three biggest challenges I faced during this project:
## The Twitter API has stupid limitations
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## Does anyone ever update phpBBs?
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## Archiving mailing lists
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