Of Love and Hope (Beauty and the Beast mailing list)

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Mailing List
Name:	Of Love and Hope
Date(s):	1993-1999
Moderated:
Moderators/List Maintainers:	Betty Christophy and Eric Tullis
Founder(s):
Type:	mailing list
Fandom:	Beauty and the Beast
URL:	Of Love and Hope Archives, Archived version
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Of Love and Hope was a Beauty and the Beast mailing list moderated by Betty Christophy and Eric Tullis from September 1993 until March 1999.

By May 1994, membership had reached 100. That number increased over the summer after flyers were handed out at Tunnelcon 1 and they began cross-adverting on the Helper's Network Gazette mailing list on AOL. By September 1995 they had 171 members, by May 1996 250 members and by Sept 1998 they reached 477 members.

At the 1996 Beauty and the Beast convention, "A Moment in Time" in Manchester, England, the mailing list newsletter was voted "Best Foreign Newsletter, Magazine or Letterzine."

Publicly Archived

All six digests are publicly archived, see Of Love and Hope Archives, ^{Archived version}.

Cessation

On March 20, 1999, the mailing list newsletter ceased publication. From Volume 6:

"After a lot of difficult deliberation, Betty and I have decided to cease publication of OLAH as of this issue. After the three-month experiment with weekly issues failed to inject the life back into the list that we hoped

it would, we came to realize that OLAH's heyday has come and gone, and it is time to put it to bed.

Thanks beyond words or measure go out to Betty Christophy, without whom none of this would have happened. I'd also like to send gratitude out to Jean Torrance, who ably stepped in as coeditor (issues 1.25-2.07) when Betty graduated from school.

But of course, I'm so very grateful to all of the subscribers who have come and gone over the last five-and-a-half years. We certainly could not have predicted when that first issue went out (to less than 25 people!) that OLAH would have blossomed the way it did. No mailing list thrives like that without the posts and enthusiasm of its subscriber base, and you have my unending thanks for providing us with both in great measure

for all those years!"

Some 1994 Thoughts on Archival

Now I have an issue to bring up for discussion that hopefully will help us all out. Since we've been around for a year now, I think it's safe to say that we'll be around for a while longer. We've proven that there's enough support to keep a list like this alive! But for the convenience of new members in the future, and for the general safeguarding of everything we've built so far, I would very much like to start an ftp archive for OLAH and OLAH/BATB-related materials. I see such an archive serving several purposes. First, I would want to store back issues of OLAH there. This would make my life easier, because every once in a while a new member will ask me to send them the OLAH back issues. I am happy to do this, of course, and I actually volunteer to do this in my welcome post to new members. But it's getting to the point where that process takes days, as I send the digests out only a few at a time. Having an ftp site for new members to peruse would be more convenient for everyone, I think. We could have each digest of the current volume stored there individually, with previous volumes stored all-in-one in .zip format, as an example. Second, I want to start a BATB-related image archive. I know Garth Price has some wonderful LH & BATB images, and I have many items that I've been wanting to make high-quality scans of (including the video box covers and the cover of the "Portrait Of Love" graphic novel ). And I'm sure there are other contributions that others could make. For example, I'd like to have photos on file from the cons, featuring highlights from the events along with text files explaining the photos. It would really be nice to have photos of our more vocal listmembers on file! Also, original artwork could be stored this way. That would give us a way to share artwork the way the printed zines do now… Third, I'd like to have stored the kind of info on general fandom and cons that was not readily available to me when I was a budding fan. For instance, one useful file could be one with addresses to all the currently available printed zines, as well as prices and descriptions. Another useful file could be one with the proper registration info on the upcoming con. Another file describing novels and such would be great. Also, an ftp site would afford us the space to store uncut versions of Nan's Helper's Network Gazette via Lisa! What do you think? So the question is: where could we put all this stuff? Which site? I know there is a scrap or two of BATB stuff out there already (like the ep guide that was the basis for ours), sitting out at ftp.uu.net and at ftp.coe.montana.edu. But what is the first step? Who do I contact about getting some space at an ftp site set up for us? Surely there's a better way than fishing around for a poc at each and every site there is, and sending them each posts asking "can we store stuff here?" If ANYONE has some guidance for me on this, please email me!! Anyway, those are my thoughts. Let's get our heads together on this and try to start off our second year by getting an archive site put together!