Mike Franch Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 Old concertina catalogues and price lists have been an invaluable research tool for concertina history enthusiasts. Members of our community frequently refer to them. We can look them up on concertina.com http://www.concertina.com/pricelists/index.htm If I want information about current makes of concertinas, I go to the makers' websites. Perhaps printed catalogues exist for Morse, Wakker, Edgley, and others, and I've just never seen them. But I suspect that all that used to be printed is now electronic. Will all this eventually be lost, or is there/should there be/could there be an effort to at least print out and preserve the contents of websites for the future? Electrons might never die, but they sure go away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry McGee Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 I agree Mike. And not just pricelists. Researchers of the future are going to want to know what we knew and thought about technical and historical issues too. It might explain a lot.... My website (not that I make concertinas!) is archived regularly by the National Library of Australia, in Pandora. Apparently, Pandora had this box, see, and..... "Regularly" in this case means every two years - perhaps that's the norm, or maybe they determine a frequency relevant to the rate of new material being added. You can see where I was up to back as far as 2002 by going to: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/24785. Australian makers can find out about Pandora from the About Pandora link at the left of that page. I don't know exactly what will happen if I were to take my website down - whether a search for my price list would automatically yield an archived copy, or whether you would need to go to Pandora to get it. Certainly I can "find myself" by searching for "mcgee flutes pandora" so, if everything else disappeared, I guess that would float upwards. I imagine similar bodies in all countries have similar policies. So, it might be good for makers to contact the appropriate body in their country and ask them to add their websites to the national collection. Given the things instrument makers make tend to last for hundreds of years, it's appropriate our records do too. It probably means we ought to have our sales records online too, so players of the future can track their instrument. That might be seen these days to compromise privacy. There are also web archives such as The Wayback Machine, but I don't know how they work. Terry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Chambers Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 Yes, I'm afraid printed paper catalogues are rapidly becoming "old technology" these days and online ones are taking over - so that anybody (like myself) trying to run a music shop, or other business, now needs to use a computer to see what is available from many of their suppliers (be they manufacturers or wholesalers), or to check prices. It does have advantages, in that printed catalogues are expensive to produce and often out of date immediately they are issued - whilst online ones can easily be kept fully up to date, but they are (by definition) decidedly impermanent... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel Hersh Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 Yes, I'm afraid printed paper catalogues are rapidly becoming "old technology" these days and online ones are taking over - so that anybody (like myself) trying to run a music shop, or other business, now needs to use a computer to see what is available from many of their suppliers (be they manufacturers or wholesalers), or to check prices. It does have advantages, in that printed catalogues are expensive to produce and often out of date immediately they are issued - whilst online ones can easily be kept fully up to date, but they are (by definition) decidedly impermanent... True, but the Internet Archive helps. An example from a defunct maker: https://web.archive.org/web/20081214174720/http://www.akkordeon-schau-manufaktur.de/produkte.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimLucas Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 In the end, it has always depended on somebody saving a copy, whether paper or digital. Either medium can decay over time, especially today, so contemporary documents may further depend on repeated copying... to new media when the digital media change, but even on printouts, due to the poor fade resistance of most inks for computer printers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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