archive

(noun)

A place for storing earlier, and often historical, material. An archive usually contains documents (letters, records, newspapers, etc. ) or other types of media kept for historical interest.

Related Terms

Examples of archive in the following topics:

  • Archiving IRC

    • Although it is possible to publicly archive everything that happens in an IRC channel, it's not necessarily expected.
    • Users may be careless with grammar, and often express opinions (for example, about other software or other programmers) that they wouldn't want preserved forever in a searchable online archive.
    • If you do archive everything, make sure you state so clearly in the channel topic, and give a URL to the archive.

  • Conspicuous Use of Archives

    • Typically, all communications in an open source project (except sometimes IRC conversations) are archived.
    • Use those archives as much as possible, and as conspicuously as possible.
    • For example, suppose there's a response already in the archives, not from you, saying:
    • However, I don't know of any archiving software that offers an "obsoleted by" feature, perhaps because it would be mildly tricky to implement in a way that doesn't violate the archives' integrity as a verbatim record.
    • Also, the other participants will expect you to have done an archive search.

  • Historical Records

    • Historical records developed due to advancements in printing technology and archival science.
    • In 1540, Jacob von Rammingen (1510-1582) wrote the manuscript of the earliest known archival manual.
    • He was an expert on registries, or Registraturen, the German word for what later became known as archives.
    • Rammingen can be considered the father of archival science since this was the earliest published work dealing with that subject.
    • Therefore it is impossible to establish exactly when archival science was "born".

  • Format

    • For MS Windows, the standard method for distributing directory trees is zip format, which happens to do compression as well, so there is no need to compress the archive after creating it.
    • On some systems, the tar command can produce a compressed archive itself; on others, a separate compression program is used.

  • Receive the report

    • That mailing list must not have publicly readable archives, and its subscribership must be strictly controlled—only long-time, trusted developers can be on the list.
    • For the list to be effective, you must advertise its address, of course; but given that it will be unmoderated and, at most, lightly spam-protected, try to never to post its address without some sort of address-disguising transformation, as described in the section called "Address hiding in archives" in Technical Infrastructure.

  • Interview Followup

    • If you used an online synchronous or asynchronous interview method, you will already have a transcript or archive of the content, but will need to reliably summarize the responses to your interview questions.
    • Online synchronous interviews use simple text chat functions that can be recorded or archived for later analysis.
    • If you have conducted an online synchronous interview using chat, make sure you have actually activated the archive feature so that you have a recorded transcript of the chat and are able to review each of the questions and responses at a later time.

  • Introduction to Mailing Lists / Message Forums

    • They refer to any kind of message-based forum where posts are linked together in threads (topics), people can subscribe, archives of past messages can be browsed, and the forum can be interacted with via email or via a web browser.
    • You can browse the users@ archives at <<>> or subscribe here: <<>>.
    • You can browse the dev@ archives at <<>> or subscribe here: <<>>.

  • Choosing the Right Forum Management Software

    • Some people like it a lot, and will be surprised if your archives don't do it automatically.
    • If you have to choose or configure an archiver, consider these qualities:Prompt updatingPeople will often want to refer to an archived message that was posted recently.
    • If possible, the archiver should archive each post instantaneously, so that by the time a post appears on the mailing list, it's already present in the archives.
    • If that option isn't available, then at least try to set the archiver to update itself every hour or so.
    • That way people who have a copy of the message would be able to know its archive location without having to actually visit the archives, which would be helpful because any operation that involves one's web browser is automatically time-consuming.

  • Treat all resources like archives

    • All of the preceding advice applies to more than just mailing list archives.
    • It just happens that most mailing list archiving software long ago recognized the importance of these properties, which is why mailing lists tend to have this functionality natively, while other formats may require some extra effort on the maintainer's part (Managing Volunteers discusses how to spread that maintenance burden across many volunteers).

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