We’ve had a few posts about what to do with your old copies of Word, Q or The Mojo. I learn today via David Hepworth that a guy called James Hyman is turning his obsession, a vast accumulation of old pop culture, movie and arts magazines into a digitised and carefully catalogued, searchable archive. I’d always assumed that somewhere, all this was already in hand – that publishers would be busily scanning in their back pages in order to republish or mine them for research, or that The British Library would have this covered. Not so. When every banal utterence, every waking thought of every nano-celebrity is carefully filed away in Twitter’s data farms and every shaky iPhone pic is automatically uploaded to vast file servers and forgotten about I think we tend to assume someone has all our yesterdays backed up somewhere too. They don’t. DH’s article talks about some of the thorny issues around rights that have probably prevented this from being viable, but Hyman seems determined to scan it all in and more power to him I say.
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DougieJ says
Saw that earlier. Great stuff.
Beany says
I love the idea of having each year of the Melody Maker in bound folders. I am always loathe to throw away magazines, just in case in my want to read them again. See also books, records, cassettes, etc.
Gary says
Lentils, wallpaper….
Baron Harkonnen says
When I moved in with then, my soon to be wife I had a room in the house I lived in full of music mags, you name `em they were there. I couldn`t take them with me, nobody wanted them so I borrowed a BIG van to take them to be recycled. Not as many as that guy but a few thousand. I was gutted for a day or two but soon got over it.
deramdaze says
I don’t know, the best thing I did was give to charity the hundreds of Mojos, Record Collectors, Uncuts and football programmes I’d accumulated over the years.
With an imminent move around the corner, it seems an even better idea than it did then.