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by xoa 801 days ago
>Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. I offered to privately explain what really happened on Twitter (X) and was blocked as a result and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar. I only want to interject the facts as I know them and maybe offer up a couple of opinions.

>and made out to be accusing OP of being a liar

I have no specific knowledge here at all, but I am capable of reading and remembering events <1 day ago. And you were here, on HN, absolutely calling him a liar [0]:

>"I was actually there. Nothing in this blog post is factual."

>"so I'll correct myself say almost the entirety of the blog post is false."

You called him a liar and now are trying to pull some /woe is me people are twisting my words/? As the top reply you never responded to said, it's perfectly conceivable this was all a result of a very poor series of communications. But you've spent a lot of words over the last 24h to try to cast shade on a well known apparently dedicated archivist sharing a very simple, straight forward personal experience he felt was negative and calling him a liar without actually addressing the substance. You don't show the communications didn't happen. You make appeals to incredulity ("Does anyone really think it would have been donated to a warehouse without climate control by the ocean if there was any hint of archiving needed") when according to the blog ("To make this donation, I paid for the containers, filled them, put many issues in bags, and then rented a truck to drive them the roughly 70 miles to the VCF headquarters in Wall, NJ. There I dropped them off and went home. This was roughly 2017.") yeah it does sound like he was serious about archiving it, and it's not at all clear that it would have been clear to him that dropping it off at the HQ would mean it would permanently live forever in a non-cc warehouse next to the ocean.

The original blog was pretty measured and to the point. Just his feelings, his perspective, and why he was making a choice to people who follow him rather then leaving it quiet. He's clearly still quite upset but didn't say the whole org was trash or that nobody should ever go. It may have all been a bad misunderstanding and leadership screw up that has left some bad feelings which would be too bad but can't always be fixed except maybe by time. But man are you doing a shitty job of making your case.

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40007300

3 comments

<bumps fist against heart>
No, I said the post was false. I never said that he was lying, but I will state for the record that he was given misinformation due to lack of institutional knowledge (I am no longer active in the institution for entirely other reasons) . I offered to privately fill him on the real story (at least as I knew it from first hand knowledge) and he chose to double down, so here we are.

I will also add, one last time, when he was dropping it off plenty of other people were dropping off at the same time. We did the best we could with the manpower we had, but nothing was thrown away and a everything was preserved to the best of our abilities. So the only sin we might be guilty of is not keeping paper in the tubs. I'm not sure what good paper in tubs does anyone, though. Libraries seem like a much better solution and we built one, as I already stated. Send some money to the VCFederation and they might help to climate control it. If you are local, volunteer.

> I never said that he was lying

but also

> Nothing in this blog post is factual.

Interesting take....

tbh, the abhorrent behavior of VCF employees (and former employees), as well as some of the commenters on Mr. Scott's page, has proved his point in spades that VCF East is a disgusting organization.