Prompted by the fact that I just noticed that the LUPEC Boston site is now squatted on by some generic “cocktail classes” page, I’m wondering if it’d be worthwhile to have something other than the Wayback Machine as an archive of cocktail renaissance websites. This is not a new thought and I probably had it myself the first time back in the 90s when Harrington’s columns vanished because HotWired got bought. Wayback is pretty good for static HTML sites but it is a shame that some of those forums and databases are defunct … but maybe they’re still sitting on hard drives somewhere?
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Archive.org and Wayback Machine are great, but obviously not exactly food and drinks focused. It’s something I’ve considered bringing onto the Barchive project down the line and as I finished my regular job last week, I’ll be taking a chance full time on Peche and this project this year.
Currently it’s focused on books and primarily recipes but will move onto web references quite soon. The goal this year is to work closer with bars to help archive their old menus and maybe even publish them online and in-app.
It’s a shame that various “World’s Best” awards recognise menus yet a year or two later they’ll be all but forgotten unless the bar releases a swanky cocktail book. (American bars are great at this game!)
I’ve got a good 1100 unique drinks and 3700 book references on the project so far and hopefully will continue to grow this now I’ve got more time dedicated to it.
What is the specific format you had in mind?
It might be useful for you to get in touch with the 50 Best Bars and Spirited Awards team for this project, as, having judged both their menu awards, I know they receive PDF copies of all nominated menus so if they’re not deleting everything, they should have quite the archive.
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Thanks, Francois. That’s great information to know!
I didn’t have a specific format in mind. I guess my focus was on sites that don’t fall neatly into books/recipes/reference but that were important steps along the way in the cocktail renaissance. Whether we’re talking global/national or something small and regional like that LUPEC Boston site I mentioned. Some web forums or blogs have remarkably long lives (looks like the eGullet drinks forum is still around, for instance), some don’t. I should dig through my Booze bookmarks folder and see just how many sites I’ve been collecting since the 90s are now gone or completely changed.
Preservation is chronic umbrella issue with the Internet. Spreading copies of stuff around helps. This forum is intended to have a very long life, and it’s intended to be one place that archival information can be placed, albeit in a thread context, which doesn’t suit all content.
I believe @RobertHess has a complete archive of Harrington’s Cocktail Time. (Most of that content is also found in Harrington’s book, which is rare, but out there.) I’d like to think Robert also has a copy of the database from the original Drinkboy forum—it would be useful for that to be converted into text files for research purposes, but it probably doesn’t need to be generally available.
I’ve been squirreling some stuff away. I’m concerned about @Splificator’s online articles for various publications, some of which are defunct, or the content is otherwise obscured—obviously, he’s got copies of his drafts, though.
So many blogs are just gone.
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I know Robert has an archive of the Drinkboy forum because he gave me a copy. It’s, uh, extensive. And yes, I do have drafts of all my pieces. I’m thinking of putting together an anthology of both print and digital pieces, going back to 1999 or 2000, but if I can find the time and, crucially, a publisher (I have absolutely zero interest in self-publishing). But that would only preserve a small percentage of the precarious digital pieces. I don’t know what the solution is for the rest of them. The world won’t end if they just fade into the aether.
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My “backup” of Paul’s CocktailTime content is here:
https://drinkboy.com/cocktailtime/
I wrote a quick app to walk the site and snag all of it’s HTML just before it went off line. I then had to write a bunch of scripts to scrub special gunk out of the HTML that would only work on the HotWired web infrastructure… some of these scripts took a little too much out, so there are some missing words and such periodically. I think I have the original raw HTML around here somewhere and can go in and try to do a cleaner “cleaning” of it at some time.
For my DrinkBoy forum… I do have a partial backup of everything. The system MSN Groups was using was a tad more complicated. Fortunately I had run into someone who had built a “search” feature (which Groups didn’t have), and it worked by downloading content, running a search against that, and then retrieving a page link to take the use to the page it was found on. He was able to send me that content so I had a copy. Unfortunately, the content wasn’t “complete”. Not only did it not include photos that might have been posted, but it also clobbered some of the content as well, so there are big chunks of information missing unfortunately. I keep thinking about trying to do “something” with the content, but it would probably end up reading more like a “book” where I introduce some concepts and ideas that were being discussed, then provide various quotes from the content that I do have.
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My guess is that the old forum content will be mainly of interest to people researching the period. I would think pretty much any knowledge from there would be superseded by now.
The thinking has evolved and certainly there’d be a lot of noise in the signal because there always is. But there’s value in seeing how it all played out, even if a lot of it was “gosh, if we can recreate an Aviation we’ll be set!”