I continue to let this precious gift of a day slip away. It’s been purge central around here, with a mix of bringing back junk from storage and throwing stuff away to make room for some of it, but throwing out more stuff than I keep. I don’t know if it’s a problem for whoever handles the recycling for me to throw away huge amounts of paper all at once, but it’s got to happen sooner or later.
Any time I confront those piles of old music magazines I can only assess the project as a colossal waste of time, effort, and industry. I would like to think that the work has some merit for demonstrating my archivist instincts, but even there I find the site is enough of a mess that I can’t even point to it with any pride. Sure, the scans of the cover are top flight in quality, and the Flipbook formatted pages look quite good for as much as you can get to them through the herky-jerky interface. But the focused search engines and the copy editing of the text are all forgettable to any observer. My aim was to do what archive.org does not, and make the text of the content fully readable and coherent. But the value of the content is so minimal that it just was not worth the effort.
It’s taken this long for the folks at archive.org to even begin scanning and cataloging The Etude. This could clue me in to the fact that the magazines are not very interesting, though I have no way of knowing if archive.org chooses its content with particular priority.
I applied for a job as a scanning operator at archive.org. They ignored me. That’s a job I could really dig into, I think. There’s something almost viscerally satisfying about digitizing text or audio and giving it a new life. My most recent herculean scanning fit involved digitizing over 1000 pages of Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. I did this as a favor for a friend but really, it was not that hard to do. The pages were just the right size for the ScanSnap ADF and the OCR conversion was almost 100% perfect, save for a few umlauts and other special characters. This was something my friend tried to get done by posting the gig to some kind of freelancer website, but his posting was deleted for being illegal. You can scan anything you want but if someone’s paying you to do it I guess the scanned material can’t be under copyright. I never knew that but it makes sense.
I’ve also digitized countless hours of cassettes, a pursuit which I was surprised to find intrigued a lot of people. For a lot of people there is something about digitizing old format audio seems like a leap of tangible logic. I never thought twice about it, though I do find the prospect of digitizing old VHS videos to seem a little more daunting just on account of the storage space requirements.
I uncovered yet more cassettes from the storage room this week, but I don’t know if or when I’ll attempt to digitize those.
I was surprised and a little regretful at learning just yesterday that CDs and DVDs are not recyclable. They are PLASTIC #7 (whatever the numbering system means) and they should be sent to a proper disposal service. I would have no way of knowing how often I did this but I felt bad about however many of those things I put into recycling over the years. I took the low road and donated a stack of CDs to a thrift shop, though it is hard to imagine what even they would want with things like device driver software for old computer monitors or other such utilities for ancient computer equipment.
As sour as I am on this storage company for its recent nonsense I have to say that I have not found a single bug in any of the boxes I had stored there, some of them for over 10 years. Of course I’m not through all of them yet but I had assumed that silverfish or moths were inevitable. No evidence of that, at least not yet. I also get no sense that these things became musty or heavy with the weight of age.
So it’s like a revolving door of stuff, most of it old but some of it feeling new since I have not had it in my presence for so many years. Nothing is of any value, of course. That is all I have to say at this moment.
