Support & Preservation

Keeping A Life Between the Layers available beyond my lifetime

A Life Between the Layers is more than a book being published on a website.

Behind these chapters is a much larger historical record: documents, correspondence, recordings, photographs, institutional records, earlier websites, research, contemporary writings and other material accumulated across much of my life.

Some of that material supports what I have written. Some may challenge or correct my recollection. Some has significance beyond my own story.

My intention is to preserve both the published work and, where appropriate, the material behind it so that it can remain available to survivors, researchers and future generations.

Why Preservation Matters

Websites are surprisingly temporary.

Domains expire. Hosting companies disappear. Software becomes obsolete. Databases fail. People die. Passwords are lost. Services that appear permanent today may not exist in another twenty years.

The Internet Archive and other public archives provide an important additional layer of preservation, and I already use them. But my longer-term objective is greater than preserving occasional snapshots of web pages.

I want to explore ways of creating a durable historical collection in which important source material retains its context and provenance and, subject to appropriate privacy and access protections, can eventually be available for legitimate research.

The objective is not to freeze my account of events as unquestionable truth.

It is almost the opposite.

I want the evidence to have the opportunity to outlive me.

From CabAction to A Life Between the Layers

CabAction — Clergy Abuse Action — was one of my earlier attempts to document, investigate and respond to clergy abuse and institutional failure. Parts of that work survive through historical web archives.

Other projects followed, including work concerning trauma in religion, institutional responses, survivor evidence, research and systems intended to give people greater control over their own records.

A Life Between the Layers now brings many of those strands together.

Preserving the book therefore also means looking backwards: identifying earlier material that remains historically useful and ensuring that it is not lost merely because the technology on which it was created has become old.

What Contributions Support

Contributions made through CabAction currently help support the continuing publication and preservation of this work.

That can include website and domain costs, maintaining public access to the book, preservation and backup of historical material, development of better search and navigation, and future work towards independent archival and research preservation.

As that work develops, I intend to explain here what preservation arrangements have actually been established.

I do not want financial support to determine access to the story.

The purpose of support is to help keep the record available, not to put the record behind a paywall.

A Longer-Term Archive

I am exploring possibilities beyond ordinary web hosting.

These may eventually include independent archival copies, preservation of historical websites, structured cataloguing of source material, and discussion with universities, libraries, archives or research institutions about the long-term preservation of material that may have legitimate historical or research value.

Those arrangements do not yet exist, and I will not pretend that they do.

This page will be updated as they develop.

Questions of privacy will also matter. Not everything accumulated across a lifetime should automatically become public merely because it has survived. Material involving other people, confidential records and sensitive survivor information will require careful decisions about access, restriction and, where appropriate, embargo.

Support This Work

If you would like to contribute towards the continued publication and preservation of A Life Between the Layers, you can currently do so through CabAction — Clergy Abuse Action.

Support This Work

Your contribution helps me continue the immediate work while I investigate ways of making the record substantially more permanent than the person writing it.

I had finally become permanent, and found myself thinking about how to make the things I had written more permanent than I was.