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David
Marvin inquires from
Rochester Monday, September 18, 2000
Just Curious: Who keeps up your Webste?
I AM a freshman at the University of Rochester. I am in a class called War and Memory here at the U of R. I was curious as to who keeps up your page and who is assigned to placing new articles and maintaining the web site. I would like to compliment you on the quality of the site and say that it is a very provocative site, but for the class I would just like any information that you could give me. I appreciate your time and your timely response. My paper on your site is due on Monday September 18th. I would appreciate any additional information that you might have to give to me. Thank you again and have a great day.
David
Irving replied on Monday, September 18, 2000:
Surprise answer for you: I do the work all myself. I learned HTML three years ago after I started the website, driving around the Pacific North-West (or rather being driven); I read all the For Dummies books, which told me a lot I needed to know, a lot I didn't need; and didn't tell me a lot I did need. E.g.: keep files small. I use a lot of Javascripts too, but have found they cause problems.
Last year I decided on principle to offer on the Internet all my books eventually as free downloads; this costs a lot to prepare and upload and webspace, but it's my way of saying thank-you to the community. I get a lot of emails from students around the world, asking for help in consequence. I have tried to find a paid staff member who can take over half the work of running the site. No luck so far, after a number of false starts.
The material is selected by me from a very large volume of submissions made to me mostly by strangers. The copyright problem bothers me, but usually the copyright owners are satisfied with proper acknowledgement of the origin of the materials. Only ones to beef so far: Daily Telegraph, London; New York Times; Jerusalem Post and -- Deborah Lipstadt, who did not like her wilder Ergüsse in Ha'aretz (where she proclaimed a ritual Jewish death threat in Hebrew on me) being reproduced for the non- Jewish readership. Ha'aretz is by the way a very good newspaper.
You will see that I am also going the PDF way that is being chosen by large institutions (FBI, Smithsonian etc). I am also banking on bandwidths and download speeds generally increasing over the next few years. I.e., I am building the site for the future.
David Irving