[Taxacom] Obscure web site

[Curtis Clark]

On 8/17/2012 8:28 AM, Richard Zander wrote:
> Interesting thread here. Another problem with digital legacy is email.
> Will the history of science slam to a halt when it comes to 1990?

I never preserved copies of paper correspondence; it's fortunate that no 
one will care about it save for the small amount exchanged with people 
who were actually important.

But I can find Taxacom posts going back for decades. Posts I made to 
newsgroups in the early 1990s. I went looking for a quote, and all but 
one of the online sources were posts I had made to a typography group, 
and responses to my post (the one antedated all that by a decade, so 
evidently I didn't originate it).

There are only a small number of mailbox formats; if anyone cared, it 
would be easy to make a program to mine mailboxes, parse the headers, 
and put everything into a useful, searchable format. But institutions 
are taking a different view of email: unless the law says it must be 
retained for a set period of time, destroy it! lest it be discoverable 
in litigation.

The "good" news is that it has never been easy to be a historian of science.

-- 
Curtis Clark        http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark
After 2012-01-02:
Biological Sciences                   +1 909 869 4140
Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona CA 91768