I have even more exciting news to share. It started with an email, some online research and left me gobsmacked.
The email was from the National Library of Australia asking me to get in touch. I looked at the email address, which looked legitimate, and made contact with someone on its Pandora team. Sounds very clandestine so far doesn’t it?
There was even a line in the email asking me NOT to post a copy of its email online. I could practically hear spooks at the door.
To cut a short story even shorter, I was asked if I wanted the blog to be archived in its Pandora web archive.
This would mean that The Geeky Gardener would be available on a computer somewhere forever. That’s regardless of whether I stopped updating the blog, forgot to maintain my domain name or WordPress went bust.
Did I want The Geeky Gardener archived? Are you serious? After I picked up my jaw from the desk, I replied that I’d be honoured.
Then I started wondering if the archivists had read the blog. There are a lot of posts that I couldn’t imagine ANYONE finding interesting or entertaining, let alone educational or informative. And it takes a particular brand of geekery to appreciate gardening plus science, art, cultural studies, philosophy, history all at once, sometimes in the same post.
Or had the URL been harvested by some bot and an email spewed out automatically?
About Pandora
By this time, I’d found out a little about Pandora.
Pandora may have taken its name from Greek mythology, but it has nothing to do with releasing the world’s evils out of boxes (I hope).
Pandora is an acronym for ‘Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia’, a name obviously designed by committee.
It’s Australia’s web archive, a library of websites thought to be of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia.
I don’t know which apply to The Geeky Gardener.
So there you have it. The Geeky Gardener is one of the latest items to be added to Pandora, one of around 36,000 added each month.
The entry for this blog is sandwiched between the Geekgirl blog and Geelong : electoral district : 2000-2001 revision (an old electoral map), which shows you the range of material in its collection.
All up, the National Library of Australia has 10 million items, whether these are books, manuscripts etc or in digital form. Now a blog I started under a year ago, with around 120 followers, joins them.
