It would be best if it could go to a ME club so that it can be used as reference by as many people as possible.

Reading this forum post, I am reminded that many old, valuable and rare documents and items have been thrown away and are still being destroyed by well meaning relatives while clearing a deceased persons property.

They get thrown away simply because the person doing the clearing has no idea what they are looking at.

Unfortunately there is no way of stopping this happening and so many out of print reference books and old magazines will disappear unless they are recorded in someway for future generations.

I'm afraid copyright issues will remain a problem in this respect.

Neil

I would think a scanner with double sided paper handling and a document feeder would ease the digital archive workload especially if the spines could be guillotined off and the source magazines written off. It does sometimes seem that copyright ownership is a dog in the manger position, unless revenue can be generated what is the point of copyright? If the digitisation task was undertaken then controlling the distribution would be the problem but with digital rights management I am sure a revenue stream could be generated. As some of the original paper copies are now over 100 years old I am sure they are becoming a smaller resource with each passing year. Some will fall apart or succumb to bugs and rodents others will be binned by the house clearance crew. A complete paper collection takes a lot of space to store and finding what you want can be a problem. As many of us have access to a scanner perhaps we could have a type of crowd funding project where many people scan a few copies from their collection in an agreed format and donate them to my time to host at a minimum cost as the bulk of the work has been done for altruistic reasons by the ME community. The only hurdle then would be the copyright for the last 70 years.

Mike

Many thanks to Chris. The collection is wonderful. I shall be quiet for may years reading. As I have to clear my old attempt at getting all the copies of ME to help make space for the estimated 20 foot of required bookshelf ! I will list what I have and pass on single of multiple copies to any good homes that want them. Will take a short while to sort them out.

I've known people who would go that far staples bent open every page removed scanned or back then photo copied and all returned to the same staples ever so neatly.

I just finished reading a fascinating book "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" which despite the flippant title is an amazing story of how 377,000 ancient African manuscripts were rounded up in the 1980s and 90s from their hiding places in family homes and desert caves and and put in libraries in Timbuktu, then saved from destruction by the invading jihadi Al Qaeda types in 2013. Along the way, they managed to scan and store copies of the whole 377,000 manuscripts. So it can be done. But many millions of dollars were spent in the process!

It's a remarkable story and many of the manuscripts were about mathematics and sciences etc that did not emerge in Europe until many centuries later. Well worth a read.

I have just read Hopper's posting on "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu", I must get a copy of that it sounds a good read.

The fact that they had to collect the manuscripts from family homes and desert caves just goes to show how easy it is for valuable documents to be lost forever.

Mike Poole's suggestion that as a project we each scan a set number of issues from our collections in an agreed format is a very sound idea. Many years ago I was one of a group of volunteers involved in the transferring of over 270,000 hand written records into a computer database, it did not take forever, so it can be done. Just needs that first step.

This need not be confined to just ME or MEW, between us we probably hold many very interesting books and documents that are now not available, even to the British Library.

Up to ME issue 4584 there are probably less than 300,000 pages that need copying, and that includes the very interesting covers and the advertisements inside which can be a valuable source of information.

Any volunteers?

Neil