The Here And Now

 Please promote - help preserve educational filmstrips that no one else in the world is archiving. Link to video about the project. If you cannot donate, please share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8SYb-GHii8

Link to the GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-save-an-almostlost-film-format

First up - my numbers are pulled from memory and are most likely off. By a lot.  

My friend MPH and I spent last year helping an East Coast fan process the 1700+ zine collection that she had inherited from 3 older fans.  This is still ongoing. 

We identified every zine that needed scanning (a lot more than we thought there would be), then worked with the universities who are still accepting zines (so few now, see below) to find homes.  Un-scanned zines were shipped to my friend MPH for scanning (around 700), then onwards to their destinations. We even recruited another University (Michigan State) to take a few unwanted zines.  The collection owner is still in the process of shipping and MPH is still scanning. After all is done, the fan may have 400 zines that no university wants but will offer up to fans.

I also received  a surprise donation (door to door delivery)  of 180 zines over the summer. Those were also sent to MPH for scanning, then onwards to Texas A&M University.

In the midst of this I realized I had waited too long to donate my remaining zine collection - Iowa will not allow me to add any new items - even non duplicates or items they do not have. Texas A&M University would only take non-duplicated items and they already have the zines in my remaining collection. I shipped a small amount of zines  to the UK K/S Project. I smile every time I think of my zines  - with my name lightly penciled on the inside covers like a dog-eared copy of a favorite novel - wandering the world.

And finally, the escapade Fanzine Library was handed over to franzeska for safekeeping. I scanned a few of those zines myself but I could not scan the Velobound ones since I lack the machine to put them back together. She plans to keep the Library intact as a collection.  I will most likely send my remaining fanzine collection over to her as well.

So there we have it - there are (or were)  4-5 universities in the US who  collect fanzines.

Current Status

• Iowa - will not take anything. Or maybe they will? My collection is sadly closed to me.
• TAMU - only if not already in their collection
• UC Riverside - only sci-fi and fantasy (sorry other TV and movie fandoms) and only if not duplicated
• Bowling Green (Ohio) - ????Have not spoken to them in a while, need to check
• Michigan State - only well known, recent fandoms (Buffy, Harry Potter, Z-Files) and they can only accept a few each year

There are other places listed on the Open Doors website

This is not to discourage fans from reaching out to any of the places listed on the Open Door's website to find homes for their zines. In fact,  your collection may fit into gaps that a university needs to fill  or they might have some other special interest.

Also, if you have Star Trek fanzines, KS Fanzine Library is still active. In the US they are rebuilding the library, the EU is still up and running. And if you have Beauty and the Beast fanzines they have a lending library. Blake's 7 fans have their own Discord server and trade fanzines. There is a small 300 person Facebook group for fanfiction fanzines (buy and sell).  Dr Who fanzines were historically light on fanfiction, trending more towards essays and newsletters, but there is an active 1000 person Dr Who fanzine collector Facebook group.

And  no matter what - we'd love to hear about your collection  - there are thousands of zines that have never been scanned and you might just have the missing issues. Or you might have a better copy or one with the missing pages. We are always looking for newsletters, letterzines, APAs, flyers and convention program guides - the bits and bobs that show how we connected with one another before online communities

What happens to the scans?
They are used to support 3 projects:
1. The Sandy Hereld Memorial Digitized Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University (mainly limited onsite access, deposited with publisher permission)
2. Open Door's Fanzine Scan Hosting Project
3. The Fanfiction Fanzine Collection on the Internet Archive (zines uploaded with publisher permission).

Can I Help?
Yes, you can! If you have  zines, email us a list of the titles (we need Fandom and Titles). If you want to find homes for them, we ask that you allow us to scan ones that we do not already have.  If you want to hold onto them, we still would love to see the list and borrow some  for non-destructive scanning (we pay for the shipping).

What is our most urgent need?
We need project managers to help us inventory and add meta data about the zines we have scanned. We cannot recruit any volunteers until we have at least 2 fans willing to give a 1 year commitment to getting the inventory started. Right now our team is small (3 people) and we're all hands on deck scanning and preserving. Save first, count later.

I've been combining my vid show playlists (thank you to every convention that has ever offered their playlists to their convention attendees in any format ...and an even huger thank you to those using Google  Sheets or Excel or some format that can be converted).

The Two Big Vidding Conventions

Vividcon (2002-2018), a fan run vidding convention showed approximately 4,737 vids.

VidUKon (2008-present), a similar vidding convention based in the UK has shown approximately 2,248 fanvids

You can find Vividcon's fanvid database here

VidUKon has combined its database with other conventions that run on the Conline.Club platform. You cannot search by convention year, but the dataset allows you to search by Fandom, Vidder and Title

Other Conventions
Below is the list of conventions where I am trying to gather the lists of fanvids that were shown - it ranges from 1979 through the present

• Bascon
  
• BistoCon
  
• Cabrillo Con
  
• Calicon
  
• Con.txt
  
• Confabulation
  
• Connexions
  
• Constrict
  
• Convergence
  
• DC SlashCon
  
• Eastern Media Con
  
• Eclecticon
  
• Equinox Spring (a challenge, not a convention)
  
• Equinox Fall (a challenge, not a convention)
  
• Escapade
  
• FanWorksCon
  
• FemmeslashCon (TGIF/F)
  
• FanStudies (an academic convention)
  
• Festivids (a challenge, not a convention)
• Friscon
  
• Geek Media Expo
  
• Hypericon
  
• IDICon
  
• Kiscon
  
• Kismet
  
• MediaWest
  
• Nine Worlds
  
• PacificCon/ Bitchin' Party
  
• Revelcon
• Slashcon (Australia)
  
• Sharecon (SH10x)
  
• Sherlock (Seattle)
  
• Sirens Conference
  
• Slashcon (AUS)
  
• Slayage
  
• Swancon (AUS)
  
• Southern Media Con (VidCon until 2010)
  
• VidUKon
  
• Virgule
  
• Vividcon
  
• VegaSH Con
  
• Wincon
  
• Wiscon
  
• WorldCon
  
• ZebraCon

 OK time for stats on my #VHS #VideoTape #digitiztion project

 My backup learnings

1.  I have been diligent backing up all files from one external  drive to another. But the backup software settings (FBackup) for the vid files were set to 'default" which means when they backed  up the DVD video files they overlooked the .info and  .bup files that are necessary to make the DVDs playable. There are also some older non-std video files that they failed to backup.  So pay attention to the backup software settings. I use WinMerge, a free Windows software to do file by file bit (byte??) comparisons of the first initial backup to validate will  check once a month

yahoogroups posted: Yahoo Groups GMD stats

Between the ArchiveTeam volunteers and the Yahoo Groups Fandom Rescue Project, we saved 960,233 unique groups through Yahoo's GetMyData method (not counting what was saved through the Python script and PGOffline). Wow! And hopefully some more is yet to come as there are a few people who have promised to send us their GMDs but haven't yet. We will always accept it, even if it's just as a "please don't share this but hold onto it for safekeeping" measure, so if you know anyone who never got around to sending data to us (no matter what method they saved with), we'll still be happy to get a copy!

How much of that is fandom? At this point, all I can estimate is "somewhere around 300,000?" It is really impossible to know yet. I finished working on the metadata and will be uploading it soon, and sometime next spring (I hope!) we might begin on the more finely-detailed analysis that would let us identify individual fandoms and all of that.

A new Yahoo Groups Dreamwidth community has been started where you can keep up with the progress of  the Yahoo Gedden Rescue Team as they process and add metadata to the (gulp) million groups saved

yahoogroups

 

• Uses Chrome
• Microsoft Excel (desktop)
• Selenium (a plugin that works with Chrome to run scripts) - instructions given on how to download and install

• Does not require membership to the community (but it helps with downloads of community restricted content)
• Will download comments - all threads and all pages
• It works off a free LiveJournal Account,  just set your style to Newspaper Theme
• Embedded images are not downloaded but to capture them you can convert the downloaded html pages to PDFs using a batch HTML to PDF converter

Livejournal Archive tool available to download for free. Uses Excel VBA & Chrome Browser to automate the archiving of an entire journal or community. Saves local copy of html pages. Makes Archiving Simple. Just requires some Selenium & some Chrome drivers

LJ Archivr (gumroad.com) - If you just want to test, enter $0 to download.  If it works, please send donations to [email protected]

The developer vidderkidder has been working on this for the past month and is willing to walk you through the install with a video tutorial