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A New Edition with a New Scope for the Scholarly Societies Project
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The 2024 Reassessment of the Situation
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Seeing Pointers to the Project on the Internet
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n late 2023, the Editor began to notice pointers to the
Scholarly Societies Project from various articles in
Wikipedia, and was pleased to see the
attention shown the Project. He decided to re-examine the data set.
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Problems with the copy at references.net
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he copy of the data set at
references.net presented various problems.
Chief among them was that the publisher had monetized it so highly that the
clutter of advertisements on every page in the Project was so distracting
that it was hard to read many of the pages. There were also inexplicable
problems with internal links, as well as some display problems suggesting that
some critical files had not been transferred to the publisher.
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Problems with the copy on the Wayback Machine
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ome of you may not be familiar with an amazing resource, called the
Wayback Machine, which is located at
https://archive.org/web/. It has been crawling the Internet for many decades and has archived an astonishing amount of data found on the Internet at certain points in time.
As one might expect, this Project had been archived at many points in time by
the Wayback Machine after the Editor froze the data set, but before it was
transferred to references.net - one result being that the copies on the Wayback
Machine are pretty much equivalent to the original - but the
retrieval time is sometimes lamentably slow - sometimes as long as a full minute to retrieve a copy of a large file. |
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A Common Problem - A Plethora of Broken Links
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hat the data sets at both these locations have in common is one fundamental, and
disturbing, fact - namely, since the Editor had stopped maintenance of the Project in 2011 -
around three-quarters of the links had broken - a most disturbing revelation!
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A Possible Way Forward...
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The understanding that providing website locations for several thousand scholarly societies is largely pointless
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fter extensive testing of the data set that comprised the First Edition of the Scholarly Societies Project, the Editor reached a number of critical conclusions. First among them was the realization was that in little more than a dozen years, it had become
far easier to locate the website for a scholarly society than it was in the past. Indeed, it seemed likely that anyone interested in tracking down this sort of information would be adept at performing Internet searches - meaning that
maintaining a repository of pointers to websites of nearly 4,000 scholarly societies would be largely unnecessary.
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What remains of value to scholars in the Project?
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he question then remained: What other components in the Project might be useful in assisting scholars in carrying out their research? The obvious answer is that the historical section remains of value to scholars, because it is devoted to untangling problems in dealing with references to the older journal literature. This section was created in the understanding that
bibliographic references to the older literature are often rendered difficult to interpret because they were created before the move to standardize the abbreviations that are generally used in citing journal titles.
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A unique component of the Project is the provision of rather arcane journal-title abbreviations
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o repeat what is indicated elsewhere on this site: the section entitled “Inventory of the Oldest Scholarly Societies” (“Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum”) includes several hundred history pages for individual scholarly societies found prior to 1850. Each history page includes an enumeration of the journals published by the society with a standard bibliographic information about each journal run. What makes these pages unique is that we have included an
enumeration of journal title abbreviations for each journal title listed. In some cases, we have found no such data for a particular journal. In other cases, we have found dozens of abbreviations for a title – some of them very cryptic.
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The restriction of the 2nd Edition to societies founded prior to 1850
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he Editor came to the conclusion that a new edition – a 2nd edition – of the Scholarly Societies Project should focus on materials in the historical area – which is at present limited to scholarly societies founded prior to 1850. Broadening that scope at present would run the risk of a repeat of the debacle that occurred in 2011, when the Project first collapsed.
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Creation of the New Website
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The Size of the Historical Area
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or the benefit of the reader, we shall note that the corpus of societies in the
historical area of the Project is only
little more than a tenth the number of societies in the full corpus of the original project, specifically - around 538 societies as compared with 4157 societies. This suggests that the maintenance would be much smaller than what was faced in 2011.
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Testing and Enhancing the Data Set for the Historical Area
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eginning on 2024, January 1, the Editor began the process of examining the data found in the historical area of the data set. During the month of January, much data was enhanced, and many consistency checks were performed. This work suggested that it might be
feasible to proceed to resurrect the Project as a Second Edition with a much reduced scope - namely to societies founded prior to 1850 - with considerably less risk of the collapse that occurred in 2011.
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The creation of the 2nd Edition on a Private Server
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y the beginning of March 2024,
a 2nd Edition of the Scholarly Societies Project had been created including all the critical elements of the original historical area, with many enhancements.
One small, but interesting, addition was the creation of a table containing an explanation of the various literary abbreviations that were so common in the literature until the last several decades - examples include: et seq., ibid, loc. cit., op. cit., and qv. The Editor also imanaged to find their equivalents used in the scholarly literature written in German and Dutch.
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The Final Touches
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rior to pointing the domain name scholarly-societies.org to the website for the 2nd edition of the Scholarly Societies Project, the Editor applied a number of final touches to the website. These were mainly aimed at
presentation and aesthetics. The new website went live on Thursday, March 14. An SSL certificate was successfully applied a couple of days later (Saturday, March 16).
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