Restoring BolexCollector.com
For nearly two decades, BolexCollector.com — published by collector Michael Tisdale — was the definitive independent reference for the cameras, projectors, lenses and accessories of Paillard-Bolex, the Swiss manufacturer whose clockwork movie cameras defined amateur and professional filmmaking from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The original site documented the complete H-16 and H-8 lineages, the B, C, D and L series, the Super 8 era, every Paillard projector line, lens catalogues from Kern-Paillard to SOM Berthiot, decades of accessories, the Bolex Reporter magazine, factory ephemera, a glossary, a company timeline — and the serial number tables, drawn from the Bolex International S.A. bulletin of September 1977, that collectors worldwide still rely on to date their cameras.
The site has since gone offline. Its domain no longer resolves.
This project
This project is two things at once:
A permanent preservation archive. Every recoverable page, image, table, serial number and download is retrieved from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and other sources, stored byte-for-byte in
/archive, and converted into structured, presentation-independent data in/contentand/data. The Git repository itself is the archival medium.A modern museum edition. A fast, accessible, typographically serious presentation layer built on the structured data — with instant search, a serial number lookup, and a side-by-side "View Original Archive" mode so the historical record is never more than one click away.
Principles
- Preservation comes first. Nothing historical is altered, paraphrased or invented. Where a page has not yet been recovered, the site says so plainly.
- Provenance everywhere. Every dataset records where it came from and when it was captured.
- Independence of the record. The archive in this repository does not depend on any external service to remain readable. Future maintainers can rebuild the entire website from the structured content alone.