The Robert Graves Archive History

The Robert Graves Archive was originally one component of a Web Site called "Hippeis". This web site (renamed 'Imprimatur Hippeis' in June 1999): http://www.perlesvaus.easynet.co.uk/hippeis/) was (at the time) a way of developing a useful set of links revolving around electronic libraries and archives, SGML, etc. These functions have long since been superseded by other sites. The Graves Archive remained in the same location as the Hippeis pages until the 1st of October 1998, when it took up residence in my personal web space at the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN).

The earlier part of this Log (up till October 1998) is extracted from the general record of the Hippeis site. A number of files referred to in the log are no longer available.

• 26 April 2000: the Archive has been relatively quiet since December 1999, due to heavy demands on my time from both Ariadne (which I edit) and the eLib (Electronic Libraries Programme) site. The redrafted 'Special Collections' pages are still under development, and continually expanding in scope. Hopefully they will be mounted on the site by the autumn. I have spent some time developing a scalable format for the pages, in order to avoid another redesign in the near future.

  Mail to the Archive has been as heavy as before, and I have fallen behind with replies: my apologies are due to those who have been waiting for a response.

  Most of the files available via the Archive's Audio and Video page are sourced from other sites: principally Earthstation 1, which is one of the most interesting media archives on the web. Recently however it changed its directory structure, turning much of the page into a mass of broken links. These were fixed as soon as I became aware of the problem. The Miranda Seymour interview (available via WBUR in Boston) was temporarily unavailable on account of the fact that the RealAudio file was moved to a RealAudio server. This too is available again from the Archive.

  John Woggon's excellent History in Film site is now on its third location: hopefully it isn't going to move around much for a while. I'm keeping my eye on it (available from the Prose page).

  The Archive experienced a massive increase in accesses on the 12th of March, which phenomenon is still unexplained. The rise in accesses was four-fold (431 users from midnight to midnight). The Robert Graves Society site experienced a similar (but even steeper) rise to over 500 users within 24 hours. The rise occurred in both US and UK accesses, so my hunch is that there was some mention of Graves on a television channel available in both the US and the UK. The accesses died back to something like the previous level over a period of four or five days. But as I have said, the phenomenon is still unexplained.

  The general level of accesses during the months of March and April has been around 130 user sessions per day. Most of the US accesses come via an AOL proxy, so it is impossible to determine precisely how many users are coming in from the States. The UK proxy www.pol.co.uk is also now obscuring a great many individual accesses, so the number of user sessions represents a minimum usage (within the Archive's current definition of a user session, which is a series of hits from a single address, proxy or otherwise, within a thirty minute period). This minimum usage is likely to top 35,000 user sessions between January and December this year.

  Plans for the near future include some useful refinements to the capacity of the Archive's search engine, plus some new content. Some of the longer term developments mooted for the site are behind schedule, but should happen sometime this year.

  Since the entry in this history for the 16th of November 1999 the Archive has been included as a resource in the Online Britannica's links for Robert Graves. The Archive has also been included by the BBC in a selected list of general curriculum resources in English Literature for school students. This is in addition to the Archive's listing in the BBC Education Database and in the BBC WebGuide.

  The Biographical Resources page has been modified, and additional entries have been made to the Poetry page. Other minor changes have been made.

• 16 November 1999: the Archive experienced a large increase in file requests on the 15th of November, due to the inclusion of a link to the Archive in the electronic version of the Daily Telegraph newspaper (London). The Archive was cited as an external link (along with the 'Robert Graves Society' and 'Focus on Robert Graves' sites) to a feature article on Robert Graves and his widow Beryl. The occasion of the article is the publication of Graves' Complete Poems III. A pdf format file has been made of the article.

  A search engine was installed on the 10th of November. This supports right truncated and phrase searching. Thanks are due to members of the UKOLN systems group: Ian Peacock (formerly of UKOLN, and now based at the webstats company Netcraft); Lou Daly, Andy Powell, and particularly Tracy Gardner, for work on the search engine at various stages of development. The engine is still under test, so comments are welcome about its operation.

  On the 21st of October a large archive was created of all external sites linked to by the Graves Archive pages. This amounted to more than 100mb of files, and included the John Woggon 'I, Claudius' pages before they moved to their new location. This large collection of pages was in the nature of a test, and a thorough archive of all relevant site pages (to the appropriate depth) will be undertaken shortly. This will constitute a snapshot of all significant Graves related pages on the web during the time necessary for the collection of the pages.

• 16 October 1999: The beginning of the new academic session has seen a steep rise in the number of enquiries to the Archive, and a consequent increase in the size of the 'Difficult Questions, Easy Answers' page. The page has been restructured so that the list of links to individual answers is loaded first: the answers are called on request. The first twenty responses are on a single page (with the exception of the mailbase posting responding to a question about the pedigree of the 'White Goddess Sigil'): subsequent questions will be grouped in pages in a similar way, to avoid slow-loading files. Before the file was cut up it had reached 74k and had become dial-up unfriendly.

  Accesses are climbing (though they dipped briefly at about the point students are expected to submit their first essays of the session): accesses are between 80 and 100 per day. The vast majority are from the US (about 70% of all accesses).

  Future development of the Archive has been under serious consideration since March. The major lines of its development during the next five years have been mapped out, and the initial stages of this development will be implemented by the spring of 2000. The existing structure and services provided by the Archive will continue to be developed, but additional targetted services will be available.

  The 'Audio and Video' page is now the third most accessed page of the site, after the Archive home page and the 'Poetry' page. I would be interested in comments about the use of the AV resources in an educational context. I would also be interested in hearing about any technical problems in downloading and running the necessary applications.

• 19 September 1999: Over the last eight and a half months the Robert Graves Archive has received more than 57000 hits. Assuming the same average rate of nearly 157 hits per day, by the middle of December this year the site should have received more than 80000 hits during the year since mid-December 1998. User sessions have amounted to nearly 15000 during the past eight and a half months: at the end of twelve months, as before assuming a constant user rate (57.68 per day) based on the average since last December 15th, the Archive is likely to have clocked up more than 21000 user sessions during the year. The access statistics go up and down of course, but the general trend is upward. So, all things being equal, these totals are likely to be exceeded.

  A general Graves 'News' page was installed on the 18th September (long overdue). The first item is a digest of a report which appeared in The London Times newspaper, on the 18th of September. The villa of Agrippina (the mother of Caligula) has been found near the Tiber, and is now being excavated. The remarks of the archaeologists make it sound as though they are expecting to find the remains of a building similar to the portico'd villa illustrated in a painting from the House of Lucretius Fronto in Pompeii.

  

• 11 September 1999: Links to 65 audio clips of the 1976 'I, Claudius' television series made by the BBC, plus 10 video clips from the same series, and 55 audio clips from the unfinished 1939 film with Charles Laughton in the title role, were added to the site (on the 'audio' page) on the 16th of August. These clips emanate from Microsoft's EarthStation 1. Individual links to files have been added because the original Earthstation pages are not terribly clearly laid out, and take ages to load with slow dialup connections. The WAV files require the latest Microsoft MediaPlayer accessory, which can be downloaded from Earthstation 1 (link provided), and the video clips require the latest version of the RealPlayer. The video clips can also be played by the Earth Tuner available through the Earthstation site, but this stops working after fifteen days, after which you have to buy it to keep using it. Other minor changes and additions have been made to some pages; in particular an additional response has been added to the 'Difficult Questions, Easy Answers' page, regarding the poem 'The Magical Mirror.' Access statistics have been added for August 1999: accesses are now rising again as universities and schools begin new sessions.

• 08 August 1999: Extensive changes have been made to the "Prose" page: another Claudius site (St Anselm College, New Hampshire) has been added, plus RG's foreword to Alexander Lenard's "The Valley of the Bear". Some of the Latin correspondence between the two men is now available, and can be accessed also via the "Prose" page. An extract from the Introduction to "The Greek Myths" (1960 edition) has been added, and two further extracts from "Goodbye To All That."

  A substantial amount of material relating to "The White Goddess" is now available on the web. However a good deal of it is extremely tendentious, and much of this material will have to wait while I devise a satisfactory way of including it. Graves did not regard himself as a magician or occultist (as he made clear in "The White Goddess") but a large number of people interested in the book and interested in putting up web pages about it have other ideas :-(

  Much of the labour expended on the site recently has been in quite different areas and so far invisible. The "Special Collections" pages have been completely redrafted and expanded. These will replace the existing pages. New manuscript collection listings will be available. The essay on "The physical and mental scars of World War One as portrayed in poems by W. Owen and R. Graves" was mounted several weeks ago and linked to from the "Graves Criticism" page.

  The Robert Graves Archive continues to archive pages from the web, and is now using two machines to process materials. On Friday 6th of August the files collected from the web, minus graphics, amounted to 1.9mb: two other sessions in the same week produced comparable quantities.

• 07 July 1999: The Robert Graves Archive has been included in the BBC Education database:
  

• 15 May 1999: A new section has been added to the site - "Difficult Questions, Easy Answers" [6th of March]. This is named after one of Robert Graves late books, and features answers to questions posted on various lists, or sent directly to the Archive. Several of the existing sections have been expanded: the biography section is now much more substantial, with more than a dozen links; the Graves Criticism section now contains a review of Graves translation of Suetonius' "The Twelve Caesars" (1958), and a review of Graves' relationship with academic historians, anthropologists, and others. It will shortly contain an essay on "The physical and mental scars of World War One as portrayed in poems by W. Owen and R. Graves." The Poetry section expanded recently with the addition of new links, shrank when Cosma Shalizi moved from the University of Wisconsin to the Santa Fe Institute, and expanded again when I found the new location of the site (thanks to Bill Grogan of the University of Wisconsin). The Bibliography section has been improved with the addition of the William Reese Company's site. The discussion lists section has been improved with the addition of the new Robert Graves list available from the UK academic community's "Mailbase" service. This Graves list is run by Ian Firla of the Robert Graves Trust, from wherever he happens to be at the time :-).

  The Robert Graves Archive has been featured again this week as one of the BBC WebGuides' top "Arts and Culture" sites.

  In addition to this month's access statistics, I have also mounted an analysis of the last six months. This shows more than 8.5 thousand user accesses to the site since the 15th of December last year. Raw hits are in excess of 33,000 for the same period. The monthly accesses for April/May show an average of 92 visitors per day (including the quieter weekends). "0" hits for the home page is a quirk of WebTrends: I don't use "home.html" as the filename for the front door of the site.

• 20 March 1999: The COPAC database (UK, Manchester University) has been added to the Bibliography page. This allows the user to browse precise bibliographic details of Robert Graves books held in the CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) collections. A general background to the Archive was added on the 19th of March, accessible from the home page.

• 19 March 1999: The content of the site has been steadily augmented since its launch last year. A link to a Full Inventory of the manuscript holdings of the University of Victoria was added when the file appeared on the web, in the first few weeks of the new site. The "I, Claudius" section of the "History in Film" site was linked early in the new year, and a partial listing of the Graves items held by the Royal Welch Fusiliers was mounted in mid-February. The BBC WebGuide featured the Robert Graves Archive as one of its top sites in the first week of March.

  User sessions for the Robert Graves Archive have now risen to above 100 a day on at least 2 occasions (weekdays) during the past month. The user sessions per week (including weekends) during the fortnight up to the 19th of March averaged 77 per day.

• 04 October 1998: There was a slight glitch with the redirection files from the Presence server, in that there was no redirect from the Robert Graves Archive until the 2nd of October :-). This was detected by watching the accesses.

• 01 October 1998: A brief resume of the history of the site during the past ten months (since November 1997) is in order, since no entries have been made to this history in that time:

  I moved from Teddington in South West London to Bath in South West England on the 13th of October 1997. This was in order to take up a new job. I began to develop the mk.II Robert Graves Archive in October, and had a satisfactory test version running on a server at the University of Bath by March 1998. A number of factors held up the release of the site (it was excluded from indexing by web spiders): principally questions of scalability.

  I looked at mk II again in July and noticed that a substantial number of links were already out of date. These were revised during August and early September: more remain to be added. The decision was taken not to move the new Graves Archive to the Easynet site chosen for the new location of Hippeis: instead I decided to move this Archive to another server in Bath at the same time as dismantling the old Graves Archive. Both parts of the former site at NetPresence in Edinburgh were scheduled to move on the same date, the 1st of October 1998: in practice the Hippeis site was copied over to Easynet between the 5th and 7th of September. This was done expensively from home, via a Macintosh. The transfer of the new Graves Archive from one Bath server to another was achieved in a trillionth of the time a few days later, using NFS file export (it was a drag and drop exercise: thanks are due to Sun for inventing this technology, and Ian Peacock of UKOLN for showing me how to mount one server on another). The necessary amendments (email addresses, etc) were made on the 19th of September, and on the 27th and 28th of September.

  Access to the Robert Graves Archive will remain a feature of the Hippeis web site, but it can now be accessed directly at:
  
  http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/graves/.
  
  The new address of Hippeis is:
  
  http://www.perlesvaus.easynet.co.uk/hippeis/,
  
  or for those with older browsers:
  
  http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~perlesvaus/hippeis/.
  
  

• 24 October 1997: There were some textual and structural changes in April, otherwise, barring some sprucing which was done in June, little work has been done on the site since April this year. Many of the links are now out of date and require some attention.

• 06 February 1997: Lots of server changes in the past six months, and some projects appear to have dropped out altogether.

  Most links in this site are now corrected. Some minor modifications have been made to the Graves Archive pages.

• 8th August 1996: The multimedia programming project and the systems analysis at the University of Edinburgh were successfully completed on the 31st of May: after that I was looking for another job. Hence not much has happened to the site during the last two months. A number of changes which were in the pipeline have been shelved for the time being, but may be incorporated later. The site is now being maintained from London. New items will follow shortly. Changes have been made to the stjarc.htm files.

• 8th May 1996: The move to www.presence.co.uk was actually completed by the early evening of Friday the 3rd of May, though the official opening date was announced as the 6th.

  The new site is running on Linux. Netpresence plan to upgrade the current hardware shortly, so access speeds will improve.

• 29th April 1996: During the last week of April many of the links pages were rejigged in anticipation of the move from sable.ox.ac.uk to www.presence.co.uk. A new index.html for hippeis was prepared for the new site, and also a redirection file for sable, indicating the hippeis website location. It is anticipated that there might be a short period in which the site is unavaible (in parts, at least), but all the existing materials are being transferred.

• 12th April 1996: An article published in Computers & Texts in December 1994, distributed by the Office for Humanities Communication, was uploaded on the 12th of April. This article, "The Robert Graves Database Project", summarises the position of the project six months after the commencement of the Leverhulme Trust funded feasibility study at St John's College, Oxford. The hypertext links have been newly added. Links to the file (rgpd.htm) are available in gravrel.htm.

• 4th April 1996: An overview of the Higginson Bibliography (higg.htm) was uploaded on the 4th of April. The Graves Archive front door contains the link.

• 1st April 1996: A proper front door for the Graves Archive was installed on the 27th. The materials in the Graves Archive remained essentially the same, though all the files were rejigged to fit the new format.

  On the 1st of April an expanded Graves Archive front door was uploaded. A new page listing the Carcanet Uniform Edition of Robert Graves' Works (in progress) has been added (carca.htm).

• 22nd March 1996: The basic materials for the site were gathered together in early January 96. Version 1.0 was experimentally networked on the 4th March 1996 from the OUCS Unix Server, Oxford. Uploaded from PC labs and Mac labs in the Appleton Tower in Edinburgh University during the preceding weekend. Fiddling also performed in a computing lab in the Medical Faculty.

  The pages were tweaked considerably during the first two weeks - mostly experimentation with backgrounds for Netscape: it seems difficult to find backgrounds which look good on both PC and Mac platforms.

  Some of the Graves checklists come up very slow because they are in gif format. These were produced directly from word-processed text as an experiment (i.e., no scanner involved). It is my intention to replace these with HTML versions of the pages, since it is a bit unfair to those confined to net access via text only browsers.

  The Graves audio page was uploaded to the Oxford Server on the 22nd of March.

Page first mounted on 19 March 1999.

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Page updated 26 April 2000

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