To put it simply, our archives are shot. Nobody’s maintained them in any reasonable way, and they’re scattered across two Earlham servers in a multitude of different folders and databases. They’re also in different formats: some are text, some are in whole PDF versions, and articles from this past year are in the (bulky, unreliable) Drupal server. As any librarian, historian or archivist can tell you, the first thing to do is establish a common system. The second thing is to stick to your guns and preserve that system.

WordPress, the software that presents the Word’s website, allows for swift export of our archives to a multitude of formats. The imports, however, are not so easy to come by. The archives will likely have to be manually restored, starting with the last year of articles and then going back as far as we can. If you absolutely need to inspect the real archives, paper editions dating back to The Earlham Post (c. 1948) are in the Word’s office in the basement of Runyan Center.

To recap: no archives, ongoing process, we’re working on it.