All descriptions now visible on images, and Advanced Visual Archive Search goes LIVE!
[Posted August 27, 2022]
With HUGE thanks to Ellie Farrell for uncounted tedious hours of editing each image description, titles and entry numbers now appear on each Gallery thumbnail. Now that this work is complete, the next step in our upgrade has also begun. We have added a new Search function, thanks to the aforementioned Marty Gear Costuming Arts & Sciences Fund. We have added a new page to house this function, added the link to the navigation menu, and added a highlight on our home page as well as a new question on the FAQ that addresses this new feature.
The feature is a work in progress. It will eventually search tags, not descriptions, so the photos from photographers will not appear in the search. While we continue to adjust the display options, please choose either the Advanced Search or the original, deprecated Visual Archive search. When we have finished tagging all of the photos as appropriate, the old search function will be removed.
If you have any questions about this new search system, please contact us and let us know!
Many thanks to the ICG and the Marty Gear Costume Arts and Sciences Fund for their support!
[Posted May 7, 2022]
Thanks to a generous grant from the International Costumers’ Guild’s Marty Gear Costume Arts and Sciences Fund, the Costume-Con Visual Archives now operates with the Professional version of NextGEN Gallery as the basis for our photo image collateral. We’re working now on adjusting the site to incorporate new layout options, including descriptions to go with each image. There are now over 12,000 images on the site and we could use some help with this update.
The task is very straightforward: You will copy the contents of the Alt Text/Title field into the Description field and add a [space]|[space] in front of any content in the Description field. Click Save at the end of each page, and you’re done. No real experience with either WordPress or data entry is required, just a willingness to copy and paste — a LOT.
If you’re interested in volunteering to work on the database edits (they’re tedious but easy, once you know how), send info to ccinfo@costume-con.org and we’ll provide you with login information and instructions for what to do. CC40’s collateral is done, as is CC38’s. We’re working on CC37 now, working all the way back to CC01. Each volunteer will work in leapfrog style. You get your own CC to work on so nobody else will clobber your work.
In the meantime, on the Visual Gallery, if you don’t see an image title, just hover your mouse over the image and the title should appear. The information is there, just hidden. Or visit the Data Archives for the particular competition, scroll down past the featured image, and you’ll see titles above each image as you scroll through the collection. (eg: CC01-SF: https://www.costume-con.org/costume-con-01-science-fiction-fantasy-masquerade-rules/).
A Little Menu Housekeeping
[Posted April 22, 2022]
We just adjusted our top-level menus so that the Costume-Con Founder’s Award is more prominent. To do this, we’ve shifted the ConStitution under Resources and we’ve placed the Contact Us page under About Us.
If you’re looking for something and you know it was here, please contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction. A lot of work is going on behind the scenes this weekend, and we’re pushing to get the photos from CC40 up for everyone. And we are still collecting images from folks who are donating to the Costume-Con Archives, which is awesome and overwhelming all at the same time.
Thanks for your patience!
Costume-Con 40 is over but the data processing is just starting
[Posted April 5, 2022]
Congratulations to Emmanuel “Manu” Hénault and Jennifer “Radar” Wylie on their Costume-Con Founder’s Awards…for keeping the Costume-Con flame alive during the pandemic!
Costume-Con 40 (CC40) is now over, but we have the run orders, award lists, at-con video recordings, and hundreds of photos to sort and process. Over the next week, run lists and awards will be posted with the event rules for each competition.
Costume-Con 38 was canceled (thanks to COVID-19) but the Single Pattern and Fashion Show entries were shown at CC40 this year, and those lists are also in the process of formatting.
All data will transition to the Visual Gallery as soon as we have photos identified and ready to post.
As we receive updates, we will post these to our Data Archive pages.
The Countdown to Costume-Con 39 has begun and we congratulate the bid for CC42 (costumecon42.org/) as well! CC42 will be in Colorado in 2024. Watch this space for further announcements from both CCs and note that bidding for CC43 is NOW OPEN. The deadline for submitting a bid for CC43 will be posted soon.
Also coming soon: http://runacc.costume-con.org/ (and the long-time-pending Run a CC Guidebook)!
More on this over the next several months. Thank you for your patience as we work to post all of the data.
Cat Devereaux & F.W. Evans Future Fashion Design Center goes LIVE
[Posted March 25, 2022]
A little story. Betsy writes:
“At the very end of September, 2017, out of the clear blue sky, Cat Devereaux called me. I had no reason to expect the call from her, but it was a long conversation, as calls go with me. In the end, she made sure I understood that she intended to offer the Future Fashion Design Center she and Fran Evans created on Alley Cat Scratch, Cat’s personal web space. At the time, I was deep into a fruitless job hunt and even deeper into ugly divorce territory and I had no possible way to do anything of substance with Cat’s well-loved website offering, but I did what she asked me to and I grabbed a local copy of everything, with the honest intention of adding her section to the Costume-ConNections site.
And then…we got hacked. And then Cat’s poor health overtook her at last and she died on April 1, 2020. Cat served as a dedicated webmaster for her own website, as editor of Costumer Quarterly for a time, and as the unswerving cheerleader for the Costume-Con Fashion Folio, together with F. W. (Fran) Evans, whose kind words prompted me to provide ten drawings a year for at least five of the first decade’s worth of Costume-Con folios.
The site was created using FrontPage, a system well-known for providing tons of garbage in code. Undoing that mess, making the best stab at a layout and series of pages that were easy to navigate, and then tying it all into the current WordPress version of this site all took a back seat to restoring the Visual Archive after the hack. That work has been done for a week and I am now proud (and more than a little sad) to say that the new section of the site is finally live, better (I hope) than the original. You will find the new space under Resources and also here: https://www.costume-con.org/future-fashion-center/
Alley Cat Scratch still remains live, but it’s only a matter of time before Cat’s website joins so many others that have gone to the great Internet bit bucket and memory hole. It’s my personal hope that she and Fran will live on in the words of encouragement on this site. Fran is not in good health at the time I’m writing this. Costume-Con 40 begins a week from tonight, ironically on the second anniversary of Cat’s death. There will be two Future Fashion Shows at CC40, to make up for the one we lost to COVID-19 in Montreal in 2020.”
Please let us know if there’s anything you would like us to add or correct in the new section. Thanks for your continued support!
Visual Archive Update ALMOST DONE!
[Posted March 21, 2022]
A full week and some change before the start of CC40, all the collateral that was available before our Gallery2 installation broke, and now there’s even more, including ALL the photo collateral from CC37!
We are still adding content to the site (working on the dolls and quilts from CC35 now) and there is a new In Memory of… page. In the very dark ages, there was such a page, but it’s lost to the mists of time, so this is the first instance in our history where all the names we know about are gathered together. If you know of someone in our Costume-Con community (costumer, con-com member, program participant or long-time enthusiast) who has died, please let us know the year and we will add their name to the list. We gratefully acknowledge the work the ICG Archives have done to memorialize these and other members of the greater Costume community.
There’s more to come, in the very near future. Hoping to announce those updates at Costume-Con 40 next weekend. Come find us in the Exhibits area if you attend the con. There will be plenty to see, we promise!
Visual Archive Update ALMOST DONE!
[Posted March 10, 2022]
We now have the galleries for everything from 1-36 done. There’s still photos and data missing from CC37, but we’ll be working on that over the coming week, and we’re still hoping to finish in time for CC40. Along with the Visual update, the Data Archive now has most competition rules, con committee lists, and a whole lot more.
We have several new sections of the site planned as well, when we’ve finished the update.
Watch this space for announcements as they happen.
Thanks!
Visual Archive Update IN PROGRESS
As of today, Costume-Con data and galleries are available for Costume-Cons 1-19.
If you have VHS videotapes, program books, pocket programs, or other items from previous CCs, this would be a GREAT time to donate your materials to the cause. Data collection (scanned and edited) ended with CC24 and as most of the CC websites have become unavailable (only to be found on the Internet Archive at archive.org), having access to these materials means we can continue to post the rules, program items, participant names, and other useful information about program book contents and website maps.
If you have items to offer, please consider bringing them with you to Costume-Con 40 in Bethesda or contact the Costume-Con Archivist at ccinfo@costume-con.org and let us know. We’re happy to scan and return your documents if you want them back.
Also looking for statistics (how many attended, how much memberships cost, etc.) and will compile the list of missing data when we finish moving all the photos back online.
Thanks for asking/helping!
CC39 Moves to 2023
From the CC39 ConCom:
Costume-Con 39 Moves to 2023
From the CC39 ConCom:
“We’re changing dates!”
We’ve been following the news just like everyone, trying to decide if we could even have a convention in 2021. After discussions with the hotel and the sponsoring groups, we have CHANGED DATES for Costume-Con 39 to be April 21 through April 24, 2023.
We are planning some virtual events on our original weekend, so stay tuned for more details. We know that there are lots of questions, and will have answers for those we’ve thought of in a separate post. But please reach out to info@costumecon39.org with any we haven’t (yet) answered. We will also be adding a special competition related to the date change. More to come!”
For more information, please visit the Costume-Con 39 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
What this means:
Will there be a Costume-Con 41? No. Costume-Con 39 is taking the place of 41. Numbering will resume with Costume-Con 42 in 2024.
Was there a Costume-Con 40? Yes. Costume-Con 40 took place from April 1-4, 2022, in Bethesda, Maryland. Photos are still being labeled and should be posted soon.
When is site selection for Costume-Con 43? In 2018 Costume-Con as an entity moved to a two-year bid cycle rather than a three-year bid cycle, just in time for COVID-19 to interrupt everything. Bids are due Fall 2022 for Costume-Con 43.
You need to be at least a Supporting member of the current Costume-Con to vote for site selection. Your voting fee gets you a $10 credit toward membership with the winning bid and gives them seed money to work with for planning. Websites cost money and so do other advertising platforms. Please consider voting in Site Selection every year.
What is going to happen to site selection? Costume-Con as an entity moved to a two year bid cycle rather than a three year bid cycle in 2018. Therefore, Costume-Con 39† in 2023 will vote on Costume-Con 43 in 2025.
AND…
We have in hand a bid for Costume-Con 42, from Denver, Colorado for Spring of 2024. The conference will be headed by chairpersons Erin Card and Beverly Warner. Specific location and dates to be announced as we get closer to CC 39. Costume-Con 42 shall be backed and organized by Shiny Garden, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that organizes inclusive and diversity-friendly fan events in the Rocky Mountain region.
Voting on the CC42 bid will take place at Costume-Con 40 in Bethesda, Maryland in 2022.
Watch this space for announcements of details on next year’s events as we hear about them.
BIDDING FOR COSTUME-CON 41 (2023) HAS REOPENED
The Quebec City bid has unfortunately been withdrawn. Please send your bid materials to the Service Mark Holder as soon as possible!
NOTE: September 13, 2019 was the original deadline to bid for Costume-Con 41; however, the Service Mark Holder has extended this deadline to October 31, 2020.
If you plan to submit a bid, contact us as soon as possible and let us know your paperwork is coming!
See How to Bid for a Costume-Con Conference for more information on submitting your bid.
As a result of the recent change to the ConStitution, Site Selection for Costume-Con 41 will take place in San Jose, CA at Costume-Con 39, April 23-26, 2021. Members of CC38 who were eligible to vote in Site Selection will be able to vote next year during Site Selection! Instructions for submitting your Site Selection ballot will be available as we get closer to next year’s conference. Bidding for Site Selection is now a two-year process. Please plan accordingly. Bidding paperwork for CC42 must be received by the deadline so that Site Selection will take place at Costume-Con 40 in Bethesda, MD.
For more information, please see our ConStitution.
CC38, THE CONSTITUTION, AND MORE
[Posted March 18, 2020]
On Thursday, March 12, 2020, Quebec Premier Francois Legault announced that all events over 250 attendees were required to cancel out of concern for containing the spread of COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus). Unfortunately, this announcement led to the sudden cancellation of Costume-Con 38. For more information regarding Costume-Con 38, please visit their website.
As a result, Site Selection for Costume-Con 41 will take place in San Jose, CA at Costume-Con 39, April 23-26, 2021. Members of CC38 who were eligible to vote in Site Selection will be able to vote next year during Site Selection! Instructions for submitting your Site Selection ballot will be available as we get closer to next year’s conference.
The newly revised Costume-Con ConStitution (version 3.0) was posted in its entirety last night, March 17, 2020 (coincidentally Marty Gear’s birthday). With this major revision, please note that there will no longer be a Word-printable version. The living document posted on this website is the definitive version of our guiding rules. We thank the following people for participating in the rewriting process, which took two years to complete: Karen Schnaubelt (Service Mark Holder), Betsy R. Marks (Costume-Con Web Manager), Pierre E. Pettinger, Jr., Kevin Roche, Andy Trembley, Byron Connell, Aurora Celeste, Dawn McKechnie, and Sharon Sbarsky.
Furthermore, with the change to the ConStitution now firmly in place, the Costume-Con 41 bid marks a major switch in the bidding process for CC42 and beyond. Bidding for Site Selection will be a two-year process. Please plan accordingly. Bidding paperwork for CC42 must be received by the deadline so that Site Selection will take place at Costume-Con 40 in Bethesda, MD. For more information, please see our ConStitution.
MAJOR SITE REVISION COMING SOON!
[Posted November 18, 2019]
In the summer of 2016, after a very long delay, we migrated the front end of this website to WordPress, to bring it up to date with current web design best practices. Now, thanks in part to a warning from the International Costumers’ Guild, Inc.’s Archivists regarding the storage database we use for displaying our online Gallery of images, we’ve started work on revising the storage for our decades of historic data.
We are tackling this major renovation in stages, which will ultimately bring you the New and Improved Costume-Con Visual Archive. It’s an enormous amount of work and it’s all volunteer.
Here’s what’s happening:
Revising The Costume-Con ConStitution:
We haven’t made substantial changes to our guiding documentation in over a decade, and this will be a major revision (3.0) when we’re done. We were motivated to make this major revision because of several issues with Costume-Cons that failed to provide documentation for their various events over time, and because the ConStitution lacked the details necessary to spell out a conference committee’s responsibilities regarding maintaining our history and records.
As a result, the Costume-Con Archive is missing photos, run lists, and more.
Furthermore, as costume and cosplay have evolved, so have reasons to provide a Costume-Con specific Code of Conduct (CoC) as well as a set series of policies that ensure the event you attend really is a Costume-Con and not some other event being run using our name.
During Costume-Con 36 in San Diego, Karen Schanubelt, Pierre E. Pettinger, Jr., Kevin P. Roche, Andrew Trembley, Byron Connell, Sharon Sbarsky, and Betsy R. Marks met to to start this revision process. As we worked, other structural modifications also became necessary, and so here we are. The comment and edit phase will be finished in November and the resulting documents: ConStitution 3.0, General Costume-Con Policies, Accessibility Guide, Code of Conduct, and Recognizing and Reporting Harassment Guide.
There’s an active editing process underway on Google docs. When we’ve completed the process, the new ConStitution 3.0 will be posted and distributed to all of the Costume-Cons yet to come.
Revising the rest of Costume-Con.org
It was only a matter of time before Costume-Con.org’s hosting company broke our Gallery in the same way the ICG’s version was broken. Late in the summer of 2019, we received reports of strange behavior when looking up the site on search engines. That eventually led to a PHP upgrade (the engine on which this site operates).
As soon as we updated PHP, the Gallery broke, as expected, but we were prepared, and we created contact sheets with all the pertinent data for each of the images on the site. We are using the data to build the rest of the searchable data archives, and the contact sheets are stored in PDF form, available on request if you need to do research, but we are still seeking the best alternative for collecting and displaying the visual content.
Once we finish with the documents above, we will complete this work.
Please be patient. If you’d like to volunteer to assist with the transition, we could use a few people, pro bono, with specific experience in graphic editing (Photoshop preferred), WordPress, data entry, and content management systems.
A formal request for volunteers will go out shortly before Christmas, 2019.
We are working on the following revisions/enhancements:
1. Migrating all of the data relating to each Costume-Con’s program & participants, competition rules, and other conference details out of Gallery and into WordPress. When finished, you’ll be able to pull up all the overview details, all the rules for SF/F masquerade competitions across the years, and more.
Moving the photos will start after the rest of this data is moved. If Gallery breaks in the meantime, the existing photos won’t be lost, just unavailable.
2. We are adding Cat Devereaux’s Fashion Folio section from her Alley Cat Scratch website. This new section includes a series of printable Fashion Folio figures and assorted other designer resources specific to the Future Fashion Folio.
3. We’ve initiated contact with the ICG for assistance with identifying and installing the best system or plugin to migrate the photos that are presently available in our Gallery.
4. The RunaCC Yahoo Group, which our Costume-Con committees have used in the past as a resource to answer questions has become problematic. It’s now impossible to search further back in the message archives than 2012, which restricts access to over eight years of previous data. Without access to the 3k+ messages stored there, the site becomes a much less useful communication tool than it was. We’re exploring alternatives now and should have a replacement soon.
Finally, after a nine-year vacation, Betsy is back and working on this site. With 36 years’ worth of data to migrate, these changes will take some time to implement fully, but that’s what’s happening now.
If you have questions about this process, feel free to direct them to her and she can work with you to get answers if you can’t find them here. Thanks for continuing to use this resource!
THREE NEW FOUNDER’S AWARD RECIPIENTS AT COSTUME-CON 35
[Posted May 26, 2018]
Congratulations to Trixy Loup Wolf, Dawn McKechnie, and Maral Agnerian for their well-deserved awards. Read more…
COSTUME-CONNECTIONS FINALLY GETS A FACE-LIFT
[prologue, added July, 2016]
And here we are, almost 20 years to the anniversary of CCXV, and it’s finally time to update this site! The first, most obvious change, a massive revision of site style, plopped in a nifty new CMS that helps with future maintenance, is courtesy of me, Betsy, guest web designer, because it’s time Costume-Con.org launched into the 21st century. It’s a long-overdue and much needed revision.
When you visit the new site, note that some things will work differently, because this is not your mother’s World Wide Web. Revisions and updates are throughout the site. The Resource Guide, once lovingly maintained, is so very, very old that we’ve removed it because it’s no longer necessary. (Thanks, Internet!) The Bookshelf remains, but it’s also out of date. First things first.
If you notice anything wrong with the revision, drop us a line and let us know! And thanks for continuing to use the site. It’s gratifying to know that the work was worth it.
A 2007 Update From Betsy Marks Delaney, Former Costume-Con Archivist:
Just a little under twenty (!!!) years ago at Arisia, the January following CCXV, I had a relatively brief conversation with Karen and Ricky Dick concerning the mutation of CCXV’s web site into an archive of photo entries, competition participants and award winners for the conference. I mentioned that upcoming con committees were asking for historical data, not just from my conference, but for ones prior to mine as well. I suggested that the site could be upgraded to include a summary for future con committee members, so that they would have a place to point their hotel’s managers and sales staff for prior attendance data and references.
Ricky made a comment, the exact wording of which I no longer remember. It was something about making the site “really useful” by giving people a place to look up not just the the hotel information, but the rules of each competition, photos of the entries, and so on.
At the time it seemed to be doable. There were, after all, only 15 Costume-Cons to date. And with CC14’s and mine already online, that left a mere 13 more to add.
Little did I know.
Thousands of scanning/proofing/editing hours and images later, I can say with confidence that we’ve finally done what I set out to do way back at the beginning of 1998. The results are here for your viewing pleasure. Wherever possible, I have summarized every panel, listed the contents of every Progress Report and Program Book, tried to make sure the information is as complete as possible for the foregoing 24 Costume-Cons.
My baby is all grown up. I couldn’t have done it without Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley’s help, for setting up the Gallery and making sure it worked the way I needed it to, or the help and support of my friends and family. (A reasonably complete list of acknowledgements can be found on the About Us page.)
As it is with most babies, though, it’s time for me to blow this site one last kiss goodbye and watch it leave. I am ready to pass the torch back to Karen, who let me run with this project even when I couldn’t devote much time to it because of kids, house moves, or any number of other possible distractions.
I’ve learned tons of amazing things about this community and the special event we attend annually, wherever it’s held. I am constantly awed by the creativity and work we put into our creations. And I’m looking forward to spending Costume-Con 25 as a member of the con, not necessarily a collector of data.
Thanks for your continued support, compliments, corrections and suggestions!
— Betsy R. Marks, Once and Future Costume-Con Archivist