SWIL filkbooks

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This page is badly outdated, and may contain some information which is no longer true.
Please update it to reflect the current state of things in SWIL, removing this template when you are done.

The Filk Book is a collection of many filk that SWILlies sing. It is a work in progress - the most recent reorganization was performed by Ben Newman. Ideally, the filk book is a set of recent or popular filk songs updated annually.

Online

The contents of the SWIL filk books are online at http://www.swil.org/FILKS/. This page is actually the most-linked-to part of the SWIL website, because the internet doesn't love us for ourselves.

Older Filk Book Notes

N.B. Ben Newman and BDan Fairchild redid the filkbooks in 2001 or so, so the stuff below is totally out of date. Enjoy anyway.

SWIL has a filkbook, which was compiled in the mid-eighties and early nineties. The filkbook contains a large number of filks by outside people, plus filks written by swatties. There used to be some legal issues involved in what filks we were allowed to publish and where we were allowed to store them. Most of these have been forgotten, but they may resurface. We try to minimize legal troubles by having correct attributions for everything, which is often enough to make filkers happy. To keep an eye open for this, the filks page of the swil webpage should always contain contact information for the current filkmaster.

The filkbook is kept in electronic form on the swil web page. There is also a little-used copy in the swil folder on the Swarthmore Data-software server (under Organizations). All content updates to the filkbook should ideally be made in both places. When this paragraph was first written (in chaos' time, by chaos), the webpage was out-of-date relative to the server files, so some current student may want to make sure this is no longer the case.

chaos wrote: If i were in charge of the filkbooks right now and had some time and didn't think anyone would mind, i would redo the filkbooks in LaTeX, since there is a program to translate LaTeX files to html. They are currently formatted in microsoft word.

Is this true? The files on the server folder do not appear to be Word documents, or anything else recognizable by WinXP. The files on the website on SCCS are very clearly text documents, and are all pasted one after the other for optimal web browsing. None of these seem to be in a format that could have easily produced the current filkbooks. So where are they? -JillianWaldman 15:16, 28 Sep 2005 (EDT)

At any rate, the filkmaster is in charge of editing the filkbook when there are new filks to add to it, keeping the web files up-to-date, and making sure there are print copies of the filkbooks for inauguration.

Is the following old information still true?

In format, the filkbooks are divided into four sections, which basically represent kinds of filks, and there is a table of contents for the copy in the server folder. If you add more filks, you should do a bit of formatting and reorganization so that things fit on the page nicely. Add attribution for any filks for which it is known, both in terms of tunes (never assume it's obvious) and author.

One copy of the filkbook can be printed on campus printers, but multiple copies should be photocopied -- if you don't want to abuse the prop budget and office services, you should apply to budget committee in advance to get funding for them and then go to Kinko's or somewhere.

If you want to be proactive, read the usenet group rec.music.filk, and write to authors of new filks asking for permission to put good filks in the filkbook. Go to Philcon, learn new songs, buy CDs and filkbooks. Arrange a filksing. Filkmaster is a position which has not been particularly well-maintained in the past few years, beyond making sure there is are several copies of the books at inauguration, but no one would complain if you wanted to do something with it.

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