Introducing the ROMA Annales

As most of you know, the ROMA Scribae group has been busy over the last year documenting the history of ROMA and publishing the bi-weekly ACTA ROMA newsletter. Not many people know about the Scribae wiki which represents not only a growing repository of historical data about ROMA, but also a unique document regarding a venerable (in virtual terms) online community. You can access all of the pages on the Scribae wiki here: http://lingweenie.org/roma-scribae/index.php/Main_Page. The group and the wiki are managed by Citizen William Gide, and Citizen Spaciva Ivanova edits the ACTA. They are always looking for historians and reporters, so feel free to contact them in world about joining the group.

I would like to use this blog post to draw attention to a very important and very interesting feature of the Scribae wiki, the ROMA Annales. We have been focusing our attention on this aspect of the wiki for the last few months. The Annales are a listing of significant events in the life of ROMA and her community organized by year, month, and date. Often this also includes additional content such as the text from notices, links to photo albums, and notecard records. As well as this catalog, every festival day for the last four years has its own page where schedules, text, and photos are collected together to document what is probably one of the oldest, continual social celebrations in Second Life.

• Do you remember when ROMA opened to the public as its own estate? (15 October 2006)
  
• Do you remember when ROMA got chariots? (6 April 2008)
  
• Do you remember when Angelia first became estate manager? (18 January 2007)
  
• Do you remember when Achille updated the free togas in the Customs House? (10 March 2009)

The Annales contains a tremendous amount of information that should rekindle the memories of old timers and show newbies the long history and development of ROMA. You can start exploring the database here: http://lingweenie.org/roma-scribae/index.php/Annales

HOW YOU CAN HELP: Do you see something missing from the Annales, such as the date your Citizen-Run Group was founded? Just IM Torin Golding the information in world and he'll add it to the Annales. If you have a Flickr account, annotate festival images with your memories from the past events. If you are interested in helping to gather more data about the history of ROMA, including interviews with longtime Citizens and research into the vaults of the estate, contact William Gide or Spaciva Ivanova in world to be given an assignment.

Valete!