web-links vs. on-site mirroring

["James Purchase" <jpurch@interlog.com>]

I have been going over my numerous lists of web-links relatied to
aquascaping, photography, and scanning. One thing which keeps biting me in
the back-side is the relative brevity of a lot of amateur web-sites -
regardless of the quality of the information which they may contain. People
move, change ISP's, lose interest, whatever, but quite often you will find a
site with some excellent information, book-mark it and discover, the next
time you try to access the site, that it has either moves or disappeared
entirely.

I wonder if it might be better if we approached individuals (amateur,
non-commercial) who maintain web-sites with information relevant to
aquascaping and asked if we could actually mirror the information from their
sites (with appropriate acknowledgement) rather than just provide a link to
their URL (which may change or disappear entirely). It is the INFORMATION
which is important to us here and if we actually mirror that information, we
can know that it will continue to be available to hobbyists interested in
aquascaping.

I have run across this with two sites I was hoping to include in our
listings, one on brackish water aquariums (The Brackish Water Aquaria FAQ)
and another on paludariums (Joe Jaworski used to have a great site on how he
set up his paludarium), but both links now lead nowhere. As both types of
aquascapes are included in our event and published information on both is
rather sketchy and hard to come by, the loss of these two resources is
potentially serious.

It might be possible to obtain this permission (to mirror), if we ask
correctly - what do people think?

I would also appreciate it if everyone on this list would review their own
"Favourites" lists and see if any have potential aquascaping information
which could be useful to entrants to this event. Please send them to me if
you have any.

James Purchase
Toronto

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