Reading the Index Today

An index that no longer answers can still be read, and this closing entry is the monograph's instructions for the reading.

The archive as the true copy

The first instrument is the Internet Archive's timemap for the domain. The captures of the directory years open like a day book: the home page with its two menus, the country files, the trade shelves, the international page, the journals list. For a reader who wants to see the index rather than read about it, that is the shelf to open. The pages there are slow and their external links are mostly dead, but the arrangement, which was the index's real content, is intact.

The institutions that outlived it

The second instrument is the web the index pointed to. The bodies on the federation page mostly still stand: EFFoST still federates European food science and still publishes IFSET; IUFoST still convenes the world congresses; the Codex still sets the reference standards; the BEUC still argues the consumer case; the trade federations, in large part, still sign for their sectors. The index's shelf was well chosen enough that a reader can follow its cards to living doors, which is the test of any index a decade later.

The web it assumed

The third thing the index teaches is how much the reading environment has changed. The directory belonged to a web in which a maintained list of institutions was valuable because finding them was hard. The search engine dissolved that difficulty, and then the feed dissolved the habit of consulting anything maintained at all. What the index offered instead, judgement about which bodies were real and which shelf they belonged on, turns out to be the scarcity again.

That is the standing of this monograph: not a resurrection of the directory, which nobody could keep honest alone, but a record of its arrangement, so that the shape of the food web it drew remains available to anyone who needs to draw one again.

The monograph's own rule

One rule governs what this site has done with the index: arrangement was kept, links were not. The old pages pointed at hundreds of third-party addresses, most now dead or reassigned; reproducing them would stock the larder with spoiled tins. What the monograph keeps is the order, the two axes, the consumer row first, the federations on top, the journals beside, because the order was the index's intelligence and it has not expired.

The reader who wants the links can still find them in the archive, where they are preserved exactly as filed. The reader who wants the institutions can follow the names on these pages to their living addresses. The larder keeps neither the tins nor the shelves alone, but the plan of the shelves: that is what a monograph of an index owes its subject.

Who this monograph is for

The index today is for three readers. The historian of the food trades, who needs to know which bodies mattered when the sector federated online. The student, who needs a map of the institutions before the map can be argued with. And the keeper of some other index, whose own shelf will face the same arithmetic of maintenance this one did. To all three the monograph offers the same thing the directory offered, in a different form: a shape, drawn once carefully, that can be consulted without trusting it blindly.

The shelf is open

The index today is a room with the lights low: the archive holds the pages, the federations hold the trades, and this monograph holds the plan. Nothing on this site asks to be taken on faith; every entry names its source and every source can be opened. The old directory ended as most kept things end, not with an error but with a silence, and the shelf is open again only in the sense that a reader can now see how it was stocked. That is enough for a monograph, and it is the honest limit of what one site can do for another's memory.