Some sad news about Nigel Evans and his RA site

As many of you will have used Nigel Evans wonderful site at the link below I thought I'd best let you know the sad news that I have recently received from Nigel's family. Nigel has developed Alzheimer's and is now in a care home and can no longer answer queries or keep the site updated.

British Artillery in World War 2

It was Nigel's fondest wish, and indeed he included it in his will, that his website be retained and archived if possible. I have been asked by the family to assist with this and my first port of call will be to ensure that the Wayback Machine/Archive.org have indexed the site and the British Library's Internet archive project also. Beyond that I intend to harvest the site via a web grabber and to put it onto a suitable media and to transfer copies to the RA Museum here in the UK; the Royal Australian Artillery Museum; the RRNZA and the RCA Museum also. May also offer copies to the IWM, NAM and anywhere else that might want them. Hopefully, the wider the distribution the better chances are it will survive as a resource for a good while longer.

With the family's help I hope to be able to collate whatever backups Nigel may have had on his own HDD's and whatever ancillary information he might also have gathered. All for inclusion in the backups sent to the various museums.

I am open to any suggestions that anyone might have. This is a problem we are all going to have to face as we move forward to meet our own mortality, especially if we want our research to have a useful life after we've gone.

 

Glad Nigel had the foresight to make his relatives aware of the site, he created an incredible resource that needs to be preserved.

It's a relatively lightweight collection of files, so could it be packaged and saved in the 'resource' section of WW2 Talk to allow people to download a local copy? If it can be shared easily and freely amongst those with an interest in the subject it becomes as close to immortal as any media can be.

 

The British Library will probably take this site as part of their archive initiative. I think someone has to nominate it as being of importance and value (which it is). The BL recently contacted me to ask permission to archive my website, so they are bound to take Nigel's.

 

What very sad news. I made good use of Nigel's excellent site for my book and his work is massively worth preserving.

 

Yes, very sad news, though thank you for letting us know. I had sent Nigel a couple of emails over the last few years and got no response, and noticing that his site hadn't been updated for a while I did worry something was amiss. Please pass on the thanks of many of us for his endeavour.

As noted his site is relatively easy transfer to a new home if necessary. It's pretty much just text, with a few tables and illustrations. It would lend itself well to PDF I think. It definitely needs to be retained, either by us devotees of the period or a proper organisation.

Gary

 

Semi-random thoughts:

I would rather think a belt-and-braces approach of Safe Harbour plus BL might be the answer.

Access to anything 'owned' by BL might be the thing that needs thinking about. TNA/IWM/BL have a tendency to price themselves out of the market with licencing and could make a meal of the copyright side of things. If they seek exclusivity I'd be rather concerned...

Assigning the copyright might be the crux. I assume there is a mechanism for an author to declare something as public domain if they wish?

Another angle may be to investigate the possibility of publishing it on paper. It's old school webpages so it might not be a huge task to reformat it as a book. Go POD for minimal upfront costs and put the proceeds back into the website?

 

I am sorry to hear about Nigel. His site is really an excellent resource, whenever I have a question about the wartime RA it is the first place I go to. I do fervently hope that it can be preserved.

 

How sad

 

Von Poop, I have today made an initial grab of the website and will talk to the family again later this evening. I shall mention your Safe Harbour idea to them. Ultimately the decision will lie with the family but I shall point them to this thread so that they might know how much we all appreciated, and made use of, Nigel's work.

Thanks to everyone for comments, the ideas about Copyright are well noted, it is one of the other reasons for sharing the backup far and wide so that no one institute can become a 'difficult' gate keeper of the work that was once freely, and generously, available to all.

 

I'm guessing Nigel also has an extensive library. I hope he's made some provision for that as well, lest it suffer the same fate of being put somewhere it can't be got at.

PS. OG - you'd better edit the RCA into the original post.

 

This is of great interest to me.

When the BBC announced a decade or so ago they were going to take down the Peoples War series I grabbed the whole thing. Glad it's still up and there are things like archive.is Nigel's site is there now. https://archive.is/VsGb4

This isn't like the wayback machine. It won't come down. Between that, having the British Library keep it in perpetuity and Otto's efforts it should be safe long after we're all gone.

Regards,

Dave

 

Have added the RCA to OP, now kicking myself for forgetting them in the first place! I had exactly the same thought about his library, he must have had a great collection from which he derived all of that info. I will certainly mention it to the family.

 

Thanks for that Dave, although I made a mistake on my first post and linked a 2nd layer page rather than the home page. I've rectified that now and included a direct link to the main home page on Nigel's site. I've also added here, hopefully you can update the archive site with the correct home page?

British Artillery in World War 2

 

Alas, not. Once it's up there, I can't do anything.

Regards,

Dave

 

So sad to hear, Nigel has so much knowledge and an obvious love for the subject matter. I use his site often to check facts on my own site and have found him to be the most reliable of all my sources. His site must, of course, be preserved.
It has also made me realise I should start looking at the future of my own site while I am still able to have full control.

 

Apart from the sad news about Nigel Evans, this is the reason why I am following this thread with much interest. I am hoping some useful tips regarding "site preservation" will be shared on here. Apart from that: compliments on the good work "Old Git" is doing.

 

Here is a link explaining the UK Web Archive project. This is the one associated to the British Library and five other similar establishments:

UKWA Home

In the case of my particular website. Should this go off line for any reason or become defunct, the last capture by the the UKWA would be available at the reading rooms of the six national libraries stated. I do have other contingencies in place for the continuation of my site, but I was drawn to this offer from the BL as an extra banker to this end.

 

All for purely selfish reasons I'm afraid, in so much as I would hate to see Nigel's work disappear for want of a bit of curating. I've learned a lot from reading Nigel's website and when one sees his site cited in various books then we realise just how useful it has been to others as well.

Also, I recently had a major hard drive crash and lost some data that I hadn't backed-up. I was in the middle of a massive re-org of the data adding new stuff that I'd gleaned from TNA and I went to bed without doing a proper backup. I was tired and thought I'd just leave it till the morning, came down in the morning to find HDD had crashed and taken everything with it. Had to pay a small fortune to get data recovered, especially as two chapters I simply couldn't have written again where on there. All of which has made me think long and hard about my own data security, proper backups of research and of course what happens to it should anything happen to me. I only stumbled on the sad news about Nigel when I was checking on some suspect utterance that appeared in Caddick-Adam's book Sand & Steel.

 

Nigel's site really needs to be preserved as a source. The RAI or RAHS ought to pick this up. Even if the BL archive it, the website is all about matters RA. This will mean updating the site to take account of hardware and software changes. I would be happy to help. I will pass this to the RAI to see what they say.