ACTS Website Notice

[Anton Wagner]

I have just become aware of Ed Mullaly's website notice
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Theatre/ below regarding the Atlantic Canada
Theatre Site. Prof. Mullaly raised alarm bells about the need for financial
support to keep the ACTS site going some time ago. It is unfortunate that CATR
did not engage in a discussion about efforts to provide such support. Perhaps
the continuation of the ACTS site and similar web-based projects such as the
Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia http://www.canadiantheatre.com/ can be discussed
at the forthcoming CATR/ACRT conference in Ottawa. We owe Ed a sign of support
for his tremendous work on ACTS over the past two decades. Best, Anton Wagner.


Site Notice:

I began ACTS almost two decades ago, with text in Wordstar, data in dBase III,
and research from that exciting and excited generation of Canadian theatre
scholars who flourished from the 1970s onward. Thanks to continuing research
contributions from theatre historians and the generous patronage of UNB's
Electronic Text Centre, I have kept this research site reasonably up to date.
Now, a decade into retirement, I feel that I no longer have sufficient mastery
of the evolving technical skills needed to sustain the text and data bases at
the heart of this site.

In the best interests of the site, I have decided to step back from it. This
means that, while the site will remain a source of primary Canadian theatre
research from those early days up to around 2007, I will not be adding more
research to the site. Nor will I be upgrading the binary engine behind this
research. The site's need for technical updates - perhaps most obvious in its
search engines need for string variations, a general transition to XML, and a
new content management system - will remain until some future site board steps
in to continue this project. I would be very happy to hear from any group of
scholars or any institution interested in so doing.

As the site evolves from active to archival, I trust it will remain something of
a monument to those many scholars whose names are linked to various research
areas within it. And that ACTS itself will stand as a mirror of Canadian
theatre's vitality from its earliest days to the present.


Edward Mullaly
emullaly at nbnet.nb.ca
Spring 2009