Lives Retold: an archive of life stories
From Livesretold.co.uk
Contents |
Welcome to Lives Retold
Lives Retold is the easy way to publish an illustrated life story about a member of your family, or about yourself.
Do you have boxes of memories - photos, diaries and letters - gathering dust in a cupboard or attic?
Here is the opportunity to turn them into evocative life stories, which will be permanently available, online, to families and future historians. People don't live for ever. Their stories can.
Examples of life stories
Please click on the following examples. You can click on any image in a life story to see it full size.
Bell.William.3.9.1792
Reid.Alexander.11.1.1941
Reid.Elisabeth.11.8.1992
Reid.Philip.12.1.1901
Reid.Philip.30.1.1989
Life stories can be short or long; they can be worked on at intervals and they can always be updated. Some life stories in Lives Retold are written, as mini autobiographies, by the person in question. Some are written, as mini biographies, by a child, grandchild or parent. You may like to work with relatives to create a network of related life stories, like people stitching a collaborative quilt.
Stories that live for ever
The aim of Lives Retold is to be a permanent archive, which will be freely accessible via the internet, now and in perpetuity. To ensure survival, it is intended that copies of this website will be securely archived in several different places, and will be transferred to new information storage technology as this comes into use. Part of each subscription will be a allocated to an endowment fund. The purpose of the endowment fund will be to produce interest to be used to finance the maintenance of the Lives Retold UK website in perpetuity. It is not intended that the website will carry any advertising.
Cost of membership
Lives Retold UK is in its trial phase. When launched, it will be open to all as means of permanently recording their own lives or those of their relatives. It is expected to be a subscription service, financed through a one-off charge to Members of about £125 for permanently hosting each life story.
Although £125 may seem a substantial amount, this is a one-off payment covering permanent hosting of the life story. When spread over the life of the service (intended to be at least 100 years) it would equate to less than £2 per annum.
If you would like to dive in to the current development phase, as a non-paying trial Member, please email Alex Reid at the following email address: reid 'at' dsl.pipex.com.
The Lives Retold website uses MediaWiki software, as used by the Wikipedia collaborative encyclopaedia. The software is user friendly, enabling life stories to be created and edited by Members online from their own homes without downloading any software, and without any knowledge of programming languages. Each life story may contain up to 50,000 words and 250 images. Help for Members on writing life stories is to be found here: Help: Contents
About us
Lives Retold UK is published by Extonet Ltd, an electronic publishing company based at 27 Millington Road, Cambridge CB3 9HW, UK. This Lives Retold UK website (www.livesretold.co.uk) is designed to cover the UK. It is intended to launch in due course further Lives Retold websites to cover other countries of the world.
The directors of Extonet Ltd are Alex Reid, who is the editor of Lives Retold, and Sian Reid. Email contact: reid 'at' dsl.pipex.com. Telephone contact: +44 (0)1223 356537.
Extonet also publishes two established websites:
Abacus Construction Index, a directory of recommended construction websites in the UK and USA.
Beesker, recommending the world's best website on each of hundreds topics from Aardvarks to Zippers.
