7 Nov
2008
7 Nov
'08
5:40 p.m.
Look at what Al Kossow has managed to do with
bitsavers. Yup, a lot of
"collectible" documents have undergone spine-ectomies, but had he simply
rented a warehouse and shelved everything, I'd guess that none of us
would have heard, much less benefited from, bitsavers.
In the real world "good enough" trumps
"ideally."
Exactly. You can collect paper of marginal historical
value faster and with greater volume than you can afford to store it.
There is absolutely no way that I can afford to keep the paper that I
currently have, and have been working on triage and recycling for several
years now. Bitsavers is just under 100gb right now. That is a LOT of linear
feet of paper!
I've been scanning hundreds of magazine dups at CHM for the past two months
just to OCR and index the text for research on the exhibit we are building.
I'm not concerned about the images of the ads (including the WPS ones). We
approached other institutions, and they were not interested in the paper.
The spines were cut, and have been scanned using a high speed sheet feeder.
They are worth more to researchers as indexed bits than as pallets of dead
trees.
Newsprint is an even worse problem.