The Sports Night "zip file" comes to SquidgeWorld

[squidgestatus]

Not like I don't have 1,000 other things to do, but...

If you've been in fandom for any time (for me, it started in 1992) you'll know that before there were archives, there were unofficial archives that were passed from person to person.  For Sports Night, that was the "zip file" that we posted and hosted from time to time.  The Sports Night zip file contained fics that, for the most part, have never been archived anywhere.

I'm a maintainer over at DW and LJ's snarchive and we ran into an issue with the archived zip file last summer.  It took Box.com's customer service a while to recover the file for us (and even then, we had to convince them that this was a part of fandom history and had to be saved for posterity), and it got me thinking.  So, as an archivist/owner at SquidgeWorld Archive, and as a maintainer of the Sports Night community, I decided to save the individual stories to SquidgeWorld.  So over the next couple of weeks, the 105 stories from the Sports Night zip file archive will be imported into SquidgeWorld.org

If you're interested in these stories, you can find them on SquidgeWorld in the collection "The Sports Night ZIP File Collection."  

Questions?  Ping me.  And if there are other of these at-risk standalone archives like the ZIP file, please contact me to see if we can get them saved as well.

Comments

[goddess47]

You are such a good person! Just sayin'...

::hugs you fiercely::

[squidgiepdx]

D'awwww!!! ::hugs:: Thank you!

[bluedreaming]

Thank you so much for all your important work.

[squidgestatus]

Thank YOU! I hate losing fanworks, so I felt the need to do it.

[duskpeterson]

"before there were archives, there were unofficial archives that were passed from person to person."

I didn't know that!

[squidgestatus]

Yep! I mean in the 1990s we had a few archives, but they were typically for bigger fandoms, and Sports Night was never a huge fandom to begin with, so no way to get a whole archive just for it. The zip file was our unofficial archive, and it still exists to this day. I just don't want to lose it, like we did when box.com (the current host) changed things and you couldn't download it. Loading it into SquidgeWorld (which is going slowly but continuing) is the right thing to do.

[silencer7]

I just tried to look them through, Walter, and the site of "Squidgeworld.org" just said it refused to connect.
I'm really getting at least a bit scared by this consistent refusal to connect at the present moment.

[squidgiepdx]

Thanks for letting me konw. I'm on it!

[silencer7]

You're welcome, it *looks* to me as if things're working out right, but looks can be deceptive at best.