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A Second Edition: The Phoenix Rises
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Late 2023: Initial Thoughts about Resurrecting the Project
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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As one might expect, this Project had been archived at many points in time by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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The Feasibility of Recreating the Project in a Set of Steps
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fter extensive testing of the data set that comprised the First Edition of the Scholarly Societies Project, the Editor decided, with some trepidation, that it might be possible to bring the Project back to life.
To make this attempt more manageable, work was first restricted to the oldest scholarly societies.
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2024 - 2025: Strengthening the Research Portion
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Two Different Segments in the 2011 Version
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hen the Project was abandoned in 2011, it consisted of two distinct parts.
The first segment was devoted to the oldest societies, the Editor had
created history pages for many of the societies. These pages gave more historical information for each society than found in the chronological listings. Equally important, they enumerated the major journals published by the society, and gave detailed references to their journal-title abbreviations.
This work was done 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.
This segment covered societies founded up to about 1849. This segment had 538 societies + 427 history pages + 297 websites.
The second segment was for all societies founded past 1849; this segment included an additional 3,619 societies + 3,535 websites. The societies in the old segment represented only about 13% of those in the total corpus.
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Why Limit the Initial work to the Older Scholarly Societies?
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ecause the older segment provided rich bibliographic detail including information on rather arcane journal-title abbreviations, it was deemed the part that was likely to be of most value to researchers. It was also a more manageble size, considering the effort that would be required to fix all the broken website links, name changes, mergers and cessations that would have occurred since 2011.
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The Work that was done from 2024 to 2025
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he Editor first arranged for private hosting of this website.
Next he populated the website with a collection of unchanged HTML files from the 2011 data set that would suffice to create a Second Edition of the Project restricted to societies founded prior to 1860.
Before 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, 2024. An SSL certificate was successfully applied a couple of days later (Saturday, March 16).
Then he engaged in the laborious undertaking of checking the data for each of the 538 societies, and documenting all the changes that had occurred since 2011. In order to add some stability in the links to society websites, he replaced specific URLs with HTML code that would initiate a Google search on the society name once a  button were pressed.
Many societies in this pre-1850 segment did not yet have history pages. Work then began on creating history pages for societies that seemed likely to have contributed most to the scholarly record through the publication of journals. Eventually this work was extended to include societies founded from 1850 to 1859.
It should be noted that the portion of any history page that is likely to require most work involves the enumeration of journal title abbreviations for each journal title listed. This was accomplished largely though targeted search using the extraordinary
JSTOR search engine. 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 Results
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y 2026, January 31, the number of societies in the older segment had increased from 538 to 632; the number of history pages had increased from 427 to 563; and the number of websites had increased from 297 to 394.
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The Future
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t is hoped that over the next several years, history pages may be created for societies founded in several decades following 1859.
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2026 – Recreating the Full Directory
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Deciding not to waste the Work Done on the Post-1859 Societies
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2006, February 3, the Editor was pleased with progress in the first (old) segment of the Project.
Moreover, by this time there were more personnel assisting with the work.
He then consulted files in the vault for societies founded since 1860, and felt that it would be a shame to waste the thousands of hours that led to the creation of all that data.
Work began to fix all the broken website links, name changes, mergers and cessations that would have occurred since 2011.
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Our Hope for the Future
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e hope that by Spring of 2006, we will have recreated the full directory of over 4,100 societies that was found in the 2011 version of the Scholary Societies Project.
We plan to add to this directory as possible.
We also hope to explore the possibility of converting the data into a structured database to allow more powerful search capabilities.
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First published 2025, April 23
Substantially revised 2026, February 23
Jim Parrott, Editor
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
Sending Email to the Project
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