Last weekend I spent some time working to restore part of the Cyborganic archive that went down when oz.cyborganic.org died in April 2008. Aimee Cardwell had been asking after the TND Dispatches, so I decided to get an idea of how much grepping and schlepping it would take to get images and main links working for just that part of the Cyborganic site.

Though these things are never the quick look-see one intends, it was pretty simple to correct/revise broken URL paths. However, I came away with a much thornier sense of all the decisions involved in doing a complete restoration of the site for real (including decisions about what for real means).

Do you work to restore all the serverside includes and scripts, including slideshows done with cgis? Do you re-implement same/similar functionality with current wares? Do you leave broken links to pages outside the Cyborganic site as they were because the original path, broken or not, is itself the data in the context of an archive? Just what I needed, a host of complex techno-philosophic decisions to get to before diving into the archive data that’s been sitting on my PC for almost a year!