2024 EOS FUNDRAISER: IN OVERDRIVE FOR THE ARCHIVE

A Letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing

Surfers, surf culture aficionados, fellow travelers—the 2024 EOS fundraiser is ON and if you want to skip to the business end of this message, click here to donate.

Much of 2024 was spent building EOS Archive, a companion site to EOS. Archive is less glam and less curated than EOS, but probably more important in the long run. The concept is simple: a massive digital library loaded with surf media that is in danger of disappearing or being forgotten—books, magazines and films to start with, but the site is designed to expand and take in all forms of media. Archive has a more utilitarian look than EOS, but works very much the same. No homepage as such. You land on an EOS-like grid containing every item on the site which can then be searched and filtered.

I'll try to get a demo link for next week's Joint so you can look around Archive yourself. For the moment, hopefully, these screenshots will give you an idea.

The Archive build has been time-consuming but not super complicated. The huge lift will come in the months ahead as we first look for a partner to help run the site, then assemble what will eventually be a global network of entities—universities, orgs, individuals—who will scan, keyword, upload, and do all the other deep-in-the-trenches work required to fill Archive out.

EOS will always be closest to my heart; I will work on it till the spirit of Matt Kivlin taps me on the shoulder and escorts me back to the Malibu of yore. But EOS Archive is my current obsession because—a not-humble humblebrag—nobody else has the knowledge, the network, the chops, to pull it together. It feels urgent. I do not sense Kivlin's presence here at the end of 2024, but let's face it, I'm not getting any younger. So pitch in if you can, and let's get this done while there is still lead in the pencil, surf-history-building-wise.

EOS and EOS Archive are both funded 100% on subscriptions, donations, and grants. No ads. No corporate money. How fast we build, and how big the sites get—EOS should be 10x bigger than it is; Archive has no growth limit—depends completely on how much we can raise.

Thanks for reading, and away we go!

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Matt