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<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook - Expo Website Genesis</h2>
<h1>Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</h1>

<p align="center"><em>Cambridge Underground 1996, pp 61-62</em></p>

<p><b><i>by AERW</i></b></center>


<p>[This article was published in CU 1996, shortly after the site was put
on the web. The text is reproduced without change, but the URLs were
updated (in 2006) to reflect the then location of these pages.]


<p>For many years, the only documentation of CUCC's activities in Austria
comprised the Log Books written "in the field" and an article or two in the
annual "Cambridge Underground". A few write ups appeared in "BCRA Caves and
Caving" or "Descent", and occasionally a lecture would occur at the BCRA
Conference. The standard of underground surveying was poor and, for the most
part, surface surveying was non-existant. Often the only way to find some of
the earlier cave discoveries was to collar the people who found them and get
them to show you. Regrettably, even this didn't always work. Looking for
going leads often involved grovelling on the floor of the Potato Hut to
find an old logbook in a tatty cardboard box, then wading through it to
find the relevant write up and trying to make some sense of it. All this
before even going underground !

<p>Today, we exchange survey data with other groups working in the area, and
all of CUCC's internal and published documentation is available in a few
minutes anywhere in the world. Logbook write-ups are linked to cave
descriptions, maps, and even colour photos, and "every" going lead or
prospect is cross-referenced to the cave description. What on earth
happened to bring this all about&nbsp;?

<p>Two things - technology, and Kaninchenh&ouml;hle. The technology made it
all possible, and Kaninchenh&ouml;hle provided the stimulus to do it.

<p>To explain: for many years, Andy had been quietly sticking all of CUCC's
cave descriptions, together with what translations of Austrian ones I could
get/make, into a catalogue of caves which was supposed to be useful in
Austria to prevent duplication of effort, and to avoid losing caves
completely. A printed version occupied a very hefty ring-binder and was not
found tremendously useful, particularly as maps were somewhat lacking. Trying
to get the information to keep it any less than about five years out of date
was also a losing battle. Some of the cave descriptions are inevitably quite
complex, and Kaninchenh&ouml;hle, in particular, has so many side leads and
connections between main routes that the description was becoming impossible
to understand.

<p>It is a feature of complex cave descriptions that the main route becomes
hard to follow as more and more side passages get into the description.
If the side passages are instead described somewhere else, then it is equally
difficult to follow the route to the going leads at their ends. There doesn't
seem to be an effective solution to this in a printed guidebook, but by
writing the description in hyper-text, the side passage descriptions can
be removed from the main route without making them inaccessible. At each
junction, the passage is merely noted, and the main description continues.
But the note includes a LINK which can instead be followed to read the
full description of the side passage.

<p>This approach was adopted for the KH description and proved rather
successful. However, the resulting description lacked context, and soon links
appeared to various other text files, which in turn were turned into
hypertext. The process gradually took off, until by last year's (1995)
expedition, all the cave descriptions were in this form, with additional
material to describe each area on the surface and the approaches to use to
get there. There were also a few photographs in the archive, though hardly
enough to be useful.

<p>A few journal articles and some of the older logbooks were also on disc,
and it immediately became obvious that the value of these could be
enhanced by adding links to the other material. Hence a cave description
could have a link to the trip which discovered it; trips could be linked
to the previous and subsequent trips to the same place (not necessarily
in the same logbook) and journal articles could likewise be linked to
the relevant cave description.

<p>As the process took off, the gaps became more obvious, so progressively
more logbooks have been transcribed and journal articles either retrieved
from mouldering floppies or typed in afresh. Some early (and painful)
attempts to represent logbook sketches in ascii text have been superceded
by scanned-in material and the archive continued to build.

<p>All of this represented a considerable amount of work, and the danger with
such things is always that it will get lost, neglected or fall into disuse.
However, stuff on disc can always be distributed to many people, in the
hope that even if disaster befalls one copy of the archive, someone else
will have an intact copy. In this way, hundreds of kilobytes of updated
descriptions were soon passing backwards and forwards by email between
Andy and Wookey each week. But the material was still only available to
a tiny handful of people.

<p>The format in which all this work had been carried out was, from the very
start, the very same format which was needed to make it widely available
on the Internet in the form of World-Wide-Web pages. Soon, Wookey managed
to find us a server which would put it all up for global access. This
revealed a very large number of problems with the system, but a couple
of weeks work fixed most of these. A Cambridge University Caving Club
home page was created, and the expedition archive (by now around five
hundred separate files) hung below this. The CUCC pages are still a bit
limited (the Home page, a brief description of the club and one of exCS,
and an (old) version of the Novice's Guide to CUCC). However, it is
hoped that CUCC itself will provide up-to-the-minute pages covering current
club activities and perhaps even a weekly copy of the club newsletter&nbsp;?

<p>It is hoped that by the time you are reading this, all the extant logbooks
and all the Cambridge Underground articles will be on the server, together
with fully up-to-date descriptions of all CUCC's caves that we still have
info for. The "Expedition slide set" which has been in gestation for over
five years might even come together this year, in which case a Photo-CD
can be made and a lot of much more useful pictures added to the archive.
This is by no means the end of the road however. There are still many
surveys and logbook sketches to scan, and we have a clickable map of the
surface to take you straight to the cave descriptions (but unfortunately
the server does not yet support this). There is foreign material from other
groups in the area to add, and we have links to another web site being run
by one of the German groups working in the area. The format allows for
things like video clips and sound, as well as text and photos so we have
the tantalising prospect of bringing a load of drunken students singing
"Wild Caver" to your computer screen...

<p>However, like the caves themselves, the web site is not easy to describe
in printed text. We hope you'll try it for yourself, get enthused about expo,
and want to come along and contribute. We hope it's structured so that you
can find your way about fairly easily - if you have problems, please let us
know so that we can fix it during the ongoing process of development. To ease
your way, here are a few selected entry points. Note that the names are
case-sensitive, and that the initial "cucc" is lower case.

<p>[<em>All those links are now incorrect and don't work. They have been commented-out. Press ctrl-U if you want to see them.</em>]
<!-- 
<dl>
<dt>CUCC Home page
<dd><a href="index.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/</a>
<dt>Expo Home page
<dd><a href="expo/">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/index.htm</a>
<dt>Colour pictures
<dd><a href="expo/gallery/0.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/gallery/0.htm</a>
<dt>Kaninchenh&ouml;hle
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/161/161.html">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/161/161.html</a>
<dt>New entrance
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/161/sftotp.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/161/sftotp.htm</a>
<dt>Stellerweg etc.
<dd><a href="expo/smkridge/41/41.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/smkridge/41/41.htm</a>
<dt>LogBooks
<dd>http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/years/&lt;year&gt;/log.htm
 where &lt;year&gt; is 1976, 1977, ... 1995
<dt>Index of articles
<dd><a href="expo/pubs.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/pubs.htm</a>
<dt>Index of caves
<dd><a href="expo/indxal.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/indxal.htm</a>
<dt>Recent changes
<dd><a href="expo/update.htm">http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/expo/update.htm</a>
</dl>
-->
<p>If there's anything you think is wrong, anything you think is missing, or
anything you have to offer to add, please get in touch at

<p>Andy Waddington (mailbox 'Austria' on site 'pennine.demon.co.uk')<br>
Wookey (mailbox 'Wookey' on site 'aleph1.co.uk')

<p>and finally, the entire web edifice will be out in Austria [in 1997] on one or more
machines in the Potato hut for expo members to browse through (and add to)
to answer all your questions about the caves of the Loser Plateau&nbsp;! If
enough interest is shown, and enough photographs digitised, the current
"state-of-the-art" may be put onto CD-ROM. The site has outgrown floppies,
but can still be fitted onto a ZIP disc so, for the time being, if you
haven't got Internet connectivity, the edifice can be supplied on disc.

<p>Andy Waddington

<p><hr>



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