[Tango-L] ADMIN: Full Tango-A archives now available!

[Shahrukh Merchant]

For a couple of months now, I've been working on a project to create 
full archives for the Tango-A list (and Tango-L as well, but that's 
another story ...).

This project is now completed, with only minor fine-tuning remaining 
(that most people won't notice). The full set of all Tango-A posts are 
now archived at two locations that provide list archiving services with 
the intention of keeping them up indefinitely (but they are both run as 
the initiative of mostly one person in each case, with some amount of 
limited organizational support): Gmane.org and List-Archive.com

You can find the Tango-A archives at the two following locations within 
each of the above sites (in date- or topic-oriented formats each):

GMANE.ORG (under their group gmane.recreation.dance.tango.tango-a):
    http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.recreation.dance.tango.tango-a (for a 
date-oriented blog-like view)
    http://news.gmane.org/gmane.recreation.dance.tango.tango-a (for a 
topic-oriented thread view)

LIST-ARCHIVE.COM (under the name tango-a at mit.edu):
    https://www.mail-archive.com/tango-a@mit.edu/maillist.html 
(date-oriented view)
    https://www.mail-archive.com/tango-a@mit.edu/index.html 
(topic-oriented view)

I find the gmane.org format a little more to my liking, but each has its 
pros and cons.

Long-time list members may remember that there used to be archives for 
both Tango-A and Tango-L maintained by Lucy Lynch starting from 2001, 
but that went offline a few years ago. The current list does maintain an 
archive from 2006, but these are not searchable by Google (owing to an 
MIT policy for list archives on their servers) and don't include the 
early years from 1999-2006.

The current two archives were (painstakingly in some cases) recreated 
from my personal copies of emails, reformatted using scripts I wrote 
into the formats required by the gmane.org and mail-archive.com systems, 
and submitted to them. They SHOULD include everything posted to Tango-A 
since its inception (an odd post or two may have been lost, of course, 
which is inevitable in any such project trying to recreate a history 
from 15 years ago!). Have fun!

Q&A
---
Q. What about Tango-L archives?

A. Both the above sites already have Tango-L archives (replace "tango-a" 
with "tango-l" in the link) but they are quite incomplete and don't 
include the early "golden years" of Tango-L (1995-2006). However, I am 
well along in that project as well (in some ways, doing the Tango-A 
archive was a dry run for the more complicated Tango-L archive 
reconstruction project) and in a month or less I should have those 
completed as well, and will post an announcement to Tango-L to that effect.

Q. Do I have to keep this email to get to these links? Or hope that 
Google will find them if I search for "Tango-A archive" or something 
similar?

A. I'm sure Google will find them, as it will individual articles within 
the archives as well. But you can always go to www.tango-L.com (which 
website I maintain and which I plan to keep around indefinitely, 
regardless of what happens to the lists themselves), which will have the 
links to the archives at all times.

Q. Why should anyone care about an archive of Tango announcements on 
Tango-A, for events that happened years ago? I can see Tango-L, but why 
Tango-A?

A. Well, for one, there is a sense of history. The time period from 1995 
onwards were really "pioneer" times for the worldwide renaissance of 
Argentine Tango and it is intriguing to many to see the Tango happenings 
then. Or perhaps you'd be interested in seeing what was going on in your 
city 10 years ago?

On a more poignant note, I read in one of the very first posts on 
Tango-A in mid-September 1999, announcing Fabian Salas' CITA-2000 in 
Buenos Aires (see 
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.recreation.dance.tango.tango-a/14), the 
list of the faculty for that event, all of whom I knew personally. I 
realized that a full five on that list are now no longer with us, sadly 
with most of the five having departed at an age far lower than one would 
have imagined ....

Shahrukh Merchant
Tango-L and Tango-A administrator
tango-L-owner at mit.edu