load notebook files

edit

The worksheet file is easy. Log in to the notebook server and click the link that says upload. You can browse your local computer for .sws files which are then uploaded to the server. From then on you can edit them as any other worksheet.

I'm not sure about the sage_notebook file. As I understand it, the notebook file contains everything, from the list of known users up to each worksheet of those users. I doubt if you would even want to read it in.

This is probably a really old version of this. Modern notebook directories look like sage_notebook.sagenb. May we ask what the lectures are? It's possible there is an updated version. In any case, if you upload the worksheet (.sws) files as Dirk explains, this directory will be recreated in your own .sage directory (usually located in your $HOME directory).

Edit: In personal correspondence, you verified that this is from http://modular.math.washington.edu/ed... from the website http://modular.math.washington.edu/ed...; this is indeed from an archaic version of Sage. You could conceivably compress each of the directories in the directory worksheetsinto a .bz2 file and then rename it as .sws and try to upload it, but I suspect that won't work, given that the internals are different.

In this particular case, I would write a script to look at the directory pub and extract the worksheet.txt file in each folder in there to be uploaded to your Sage notebook; it's not perfect but I just tried it and they do work, though it looks like some of them may be incomplete in various ways. In truth, you may want to see if there is a more recent version of some of William's stuff on the BSD conjecture, which there likely is! Good luck.