David, Community Memory was a community-based storefront access
information system which flourished in the Bay Area of San Francisco in
the mid-seventies, was cloned in Vancouver BC (my doing), had ties to
public-access information systems at the Children's Museum in Boston, a
Museum in Portland, and survived in various forms, under various people,
well into the 80's.
It started out via the efforts of Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, and Lee
Felsenstein (designer of one of the earliestr portable computers). It was
inspired by amongst other sources, Ivan Illich's book De-Schooling
Society, and a privately published paper extolling the issues of free
flows of information and democracy by, called The Journal of the Bay Tea
Company by Christoper Beatty. There were some formal publications
describing it, but I am afraid my references are sitting at a friend's
house in Australia. Lipkin and Colstad published the Journal of Community
Communications which was kept by some university libraries.
Technically speaking, Community Memory was a repository of messages
(similar to the postings on this list) with which authors associated any
number of keywords of their own choice, sometimes utilizing conventional
categories. These keywords were kept in inverted lists which made fast
access possible. Creative use of the keywords enabled various sorts of
computer "conferences" or forums to emerge in a very open manner. For me,
this was in sharp contrast to the 70's use of the EIS network from New
Jersey Inst. of Tech., wherein keywords were much more controlled and not
used effectively. The contrast was for me, between an open, egalitarian
info exchange and a traditional, hierarachical and proprietary system...
i.e. much more closed.
In its heyday there were Community Memory terminals in the Whole Earth
Truck Store and Leopold's record store in Berkely.... hence, it had to be
quite user-friendly. In Vancouver, its spirit survived in the
computer-based systems which supported the delivery of community/social
information in that city.
Hope that handles your query Dave, but I will be glad to answer any others
about it.
Cheers, Doug
-- Doug Seeley: Compuserve: 100433.133 InterDynamics Pty. Ltd. (via Geneva) Doug Seeley <100433.133@compuserve.com>