In a further attempt to make my work more accessible, on the basis of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, I today sent an email to 40 recipients asking them to be a fan of my new Facebook page: ‘One small place on earth . . .’, which has just been set up with the help of the daughter of a good friend of mine. Apart from its interactivity, the good thing about the page is the fact that the nine albums are grouped according to subject, unlike the website gallery which reflects the generally random way in which the archive is compiled.

Simon Smith emailed confirming the arrival at the NFSA of the corrected Supplement 3 MOV file together with the three DVD set of Supplements 1 – 3.

I posted the replacement MOV file to Simon Smith together with the DVDs of Supplements 1-3, so we can claim that they have now been officially published, complete with slick and their own species list. The supplements are each on a single DVD in the one case and the set costs $150.

On 30 November, the day after I got back from Cambodia, I bumped into Jaap at North Tamborine. He told me about a confirmed sighting of a Tiger Snake on the Mountain two weeks previously. I spoke to Doug White who explained that the snake had been seen at night in MacDonald National Park. I suggested to Doug that the Queensland Museum and the Environmental Protection Agency needed to be told because the snake is not recognised as occurring on the Mountain. Today Jaap sent me photos of the snake, which certainly looks like a Tiger Snake. I had to remove the Tiger Snake frame from my Gallery based on what I had been told by Jaap, the Museum and the EPA. Once I know that the Museum accepts the identification, we can restore the frame to its rightful place.

Having checked Steve’s DVD master of Supplement 3, I was horrified to discover some content errors, such as a misplaced sub-title and a split second loss of image. These errors were on the MOV file I had posted to the National Film & Sound Archive 3 weeks ago. So I alerted Simon Smith who sent an email to Steve querying the nature of the error because there was nothing technically wrong with the MOV file. Steve emailed a reply explaining that we were dealing with incorrect content.

An email arrived while I was in Cambodia, with some final IDs from Matthew Shaw, the Supervisor of the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum. I have sent several emails with requests for species identification in recent months, particularly for the new Gallery pages, with EOL in mind www.eol.org. I have been wary from the outset about being able to become a Content Partner. We have to upload our website content as an XML file to the EOL website. I have been in touch with a local IT expert and am still waiting for his advice on whether this can be done at an affordable price. Meanwhile, Matthew pointed out some of the constraints the Museum has in handling enquiries like mine. It is worth quoting extensively from his email, which struck me as very fair-minded.

DIFFICULTIES WITH IDENTIFICATION

Correspondence with Matthew Shaw, the Supervisor of the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum.  I spoke to him on 6 January 2010 and he gave me permission to quote from his email.

<from Matthew Shaw>

Thanks for your queries on identifications. We… Read Complete Text

I received an email from Herbert Distel confirming that his Museum of Drawers is online. To cut to the chase, the link to my 1971 exhibit is here.

I was pleased and relieved to learn via recent phone calls and an email exchange with curator Simon Smith, that the National Film and Sound Archive will be adding Supplements 1-3 to their collection. Today I posted the MOV (data preservation) files to him. We are not quite ready to publish. Angela McKinstry is still working on the slick for the case which will house all three discs. Thus, the NFSA is yet to receive the DVDs, which comprise the published version of the supplements.

Today Steve and I met Serena Coates and Dave Allan at the State Library to discuss preserving the unedited archive. We are looking at creating discs in the form of data files to be downloaded onto the library’s computer server. Steve will provide Dave with a demo disc containing different data files so that he can select the one he finds most suitable.

I collected the camera from the repairer. This was the first camera fault I have encountered during the entire project. I damaged my previous camera when I failed to stabilize the tripod, looking on in helpless horror as it fell to the ground. That piece of negligence cost me $700. Repairing my current camera cost $508.10.