Again, the mention of Swedish Death Cleaning in the last post got some reaction, not quite as much as the book ripping which got the predictable Nazis and Salman Rushdie mentions. This has got nothing to do with railways, model or otherwise, but does lead me to a question, the one at the top. I know at least two people with huge collections of magazines - whole collections in some areas. This would now be regarded as an 'old people' thing in many quarters. Not in a disparaging way, but in that we have moved on during this century. When I launched SRI a few years ago I was informed that 'print media is dead' and as much as it pains me to agree being a lover of paper stuff, as a populous, it is true. The purchase of magazines or newspapers is looked upon by anyone under 40 as slightly quaint. For example my step children, all born post 1985, don't own a book between them, don't own CDs or any hard form music, don't buy newsprint in any form and... this is important... lead far more vibrant lives than most of the people who are now arguing in their heads. Yes you could argue that if the internet goes off you can't access stuff, but the same would be true of the tills in Smiths, so that is fairly universal. We long stopped using coins and wooden drawer cash tills to facilitate the purchase of magazines. I reckon we have about 10 years before the fall in print makes it unsustainable in hard form. Books are slightly different and Kindles haven't really taken off, but any charity shop will tell you that they have more books coming in (mainly from over 60s) than they could ever shift. If you think that these don't get pulped or landfilled, then you are delusional. People are still buying new, but the second hand market is all but gone.
If you add all this up, it explains my thinking about getting rid of stuff now and the way that some of this is being done.
Hmm, I've just been going through my collection of old Railway Modellers, the magazine, not the people. I bought most of them for specific articles, but then I also have a digital subscription, and can print anything I want from them. I'm being ruthless, and I can't se any point giving them to even a railway charity. Our local, very good secondhand bookshop prices pretty much anything railway related at £4. They have multiple copies of some books I thought were fairly rare. Going by publication dates I suspect it is the generation before me dying off. Sadly they don't have the elusive volumes on the GVT and the DHR I need to complete my collection.
ReplyDeleteI think what we need is a comprehensive digital archive of these things. The information is worth keeping even if the paper it's printed on isn't. If I had the financial wherewithal to create such a thing myself I would. I'm not saying all that old how-to information is relevant and needs worshiping, no, there's a lot more in those magazines than that, and there's no reason it shouldn't continue to live in digital form.
ReplyDeleteWe don't NEED any of this stuff. But we still like it. Sadly the future is people owning no physical media, and refusing to pay for anything digital.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with a digital archive, being faced by professionals at the moment, is what form this should take. With ever changing computer formats, anything begun today may be obsolete and unreadable by the time it is complete. This takes no consideration of how much it would cost to reformat even a small library. One of those I was involved with had taken the decision not to digitise on those grounds alone.
DeletePaper takes up space and can be a pain to sort through when looking for information but it is still the most durable and to me satisfying way to record and retain archives.
Yes Chris, as a look through my archive of photos on CD and floppy disk would prove it only I could. Then there is 8mm cine film I transferred on to VHS. Of course both the medium and file format can be important. we shouldn't think we can depend on cloud storage either, since there have been some people get their fingers burned with that.
DeleteAs individuals we have to ask ourselves some questions about what is worth making an effort to archive for ourselves and others. I suspect some material I found inspiring would look dreadful to modern eyes, but then you come across an old article by PD Hancock on building 4mm trams and find yourself thinking that everything in it is still relevant.