Last year we moved house.
We transported our belongings from one abode to another.
While packing you tend to discover a shitload of forgotten items that you didn’t know you (still) had, and then you’re faced with the decision, “do I box it, or do I bin it?”
Well, in preparation for the move, we did get rid of a lot of deadweight by way of outdated media, documents and obsolete hardware. And once you’ve arrived at your destination, part and parcel of the unpacking process is the re-discovery of the things you didn’t know you packed, the junk you should’ve rather not packed, and the stuff you weren’t sure what to do with when you got there.
2014 will be the year of digitisation.
The first major project will be the elimination of what’s left of my VHS collection. They’ll get analysed, scanned, digitised, meta-datafied, backed up online and/or a streaming server and whatever else you can do to a hated physical media format before banishing it from your house completely.
As an appetiser, though, it’s documents and papers that have been keeping the flatbed scanner well-exercised: Old magazines, training guides, technical manuals and handbooks, speeding tickets, invoices, cards, forms, rejection letters, cartoons, shopping lists and other printed matter which is made of dead trees and takes up physical space is archived and/or OCR’d as PDF files before getting regurgitated as fodder for the shredder.
Flattered as I may have been at the time, there’s no need to hold on to this (unsigned and undated?) thank-you note from a previous employer.
It’s quite nicely archived in PDF form now, thank you very much.
Equally worthless today is this magazine article my sister sent me in 2002 after I complained bitterly about the shoddy local TV programming.
Yes, there’ve been a good few kilograms that have already been shed, and I’m only up to the year 1998 (I’m working reverse-chronologically). It seems that my new year’s resolution is to diet after all: losing weight in the form of paper.
Then, looking further into 2014, there remain several hundred records, tapes and CDs to sink my teeth into. The Discogs beast is hungry. There are numerous books to devour, and I’ve got to cook up a proper website for my wife’s creative output.
And oh! Someday I must get my major audio cassette museum project off the ground.
Boredom I will not die of.
Image credits: Scans by hmvh DOT net