Bring every edition of a recurring event together

Every edition leaves its record in a different hand.

The early programme survives as a scan. Another edition lives in a damaged Word file. Then come folders of abstracts, missing slides, loose photographs, recordings from three editions and proceedings from four.

It may be a conference, congress, convention, symposium, festival, summit or annual meeting. Bring the editions in the forms their organisers left behind. We gather them into one browsable public archive without pretending they were ever consistent.

Publish the record as it is

An object does not need a perfect category before it can be seen. Filenames, dates, file types, languages and positions in the folder give each edition its first public order.

A missing session stays missing. A speaker with no abstract remains a speaker with no abstract. The gaps are part of the record, not a reason to keep the rest hidden.

One event, every edition

Editions become the principal sections, whether the event returns every year, every season or whenever its people gather again. Within them, programmes, abstracts, slides, proceedings, photographs and recordings receive stable public addresses. One search crosses the whole history.

Titles and dates appear where the files support them. Elsewhere the archive says date unknown or found in the 2008 folder, which is enough to let the object take its place.