What details should be documented about the history of Mail-Art?

[RJ - Moderator]

A lot has been written about mail-art, but some views are often forgotten.

What details should be documented better?

What are your views?

[carl baker]

who are consistent mail arters at iuoma?

who has been doing mail art for more than 20yrs? 10yrs?

what is the 'active members only' group? how active are they?

i joined that group and never heard from anyone.

some groups are still listed 'what happened to E' 2020   'lost identity' 2018,

should they be removed from the groups page?

does anyone link to 'myspace' anymore?

kind regards, cb.

[Ruud Janssen]

good questions. I started with mail-art in 1980, so that is 45 years ago.

Groups are started by people. When they become inactive for years they are normally removed by the moderator (that is me) unless they have significant historical value.

E is another story. Still not clear to me what happened. He seems vanished without a good explenation.

Does MySpace function at all?  I never used it.

NING wants this platform transferred to their V3 environment (application software).  That would mean the price of hosting such a large network would become 2-3 times higher. That is why I am still blocking that.  The sponsors for this IUOMA network on NING are barely able to bring up the already high price right now. So V3 would be just making it impossible to bring up the finances without applying a cost for members factor which I don't want to do.

Just answers to a few questions

Some things you never read in books published on mail-art.

I notices a lot of 'old-times' brought their archive to libraries in the hope things will survive.  I know that good books in hardcopy version that land in libraries also make a good chance to survive the times.

[Heleen de Vaan]

I would love to contribute to a good book. (If only I'd have sufficient spare time..:-) )

We could write / issue books about certain themes (matching the groups) or about specific periods (for instance "IUOMA 2000-2010", "2010-2020" etcetera.)

So that is a good idea, both to preserve history and to reduce the amount of MB's/GB's at NING.

And I'll use the 'Donate' button now for some more sponsor money :-)

Concerning E, in my opinion he's a legend, be it a mystery what his daily-life-name was/is. And I cherish the works he has sent to me.  

I thought the 'what happened' group to be also a kind of tribute to 'E', as I thought and still think he has passed away in those days...