Unjustified Worries
I (User:John) asked on the LJ eastercon community (IA) about the interest in putting old Eastercon publications (programme books, readmes, PRs) on this website. The results of the 2 threads (here (IA) and here (IA)) were:
- Not a great surge of interest. Those who would download them would be most interested in the programme, and searching would be useful.
- Concerns were raised about membership lists, both because they contained mistakes, but also exposed people to view beyond their fannish contract with the convention
- There are copyright issues with artwork and articles, for web publication might be beyond the original scope of consent.
- Souvenir book photos are owned by the photographer, not subject, but again people might be concerned about wider distribution
On a practical note, it would really need the original convention committee to provide updated PDFs which they would be happy to distribute. Its not practical for Eastercon.org to edit them and produce new files of publication quality, given all the software and font issues. Searching those PDFS might be hard unless you allowed Google to do it remotely, but that exposes the content rather too widely for some.
I have kept the Intersection (1995 Worldcon) science pages on my website, and perhaps twice have had requests for people to have their names changed or removed, either because they wanted a consistent online persona, or didn't want their students knowing they studied Klingon in their younger days. This kind of request would impose an ongoing burden of support on Eastercon.org and con committees which would be hard to satisfy.
As I was only prepared to do the work if it were trival, and it seems not to be, I don't plan to proceed.
Major Progress
I came back to this working on Fancyclopedia (IA), and in practice committees are very happy to have their stuff there, so its full steam ahead, for PDFs at least. John Bray has scanned material for the Eastercons up to 1987, and put them on Fancyclopedia/Eastercon (IA). Thanks to Mark Plummer for lending the archives. Files from the last 10 years are also there.
New Home for files
Scanning now up to 2018, files can be found at http://files.fancyclopedia.org/Eastercon (IA), not inside the wiki itself