Crossing the Rubicon
I’m on the cusp of a transition that I never thought I’d really consider.
I’m ready to throw out my magazines.
I have several file drawers of back issues of magazines full of important articles (not to mention good advertisements). Things like Teaching and Learning, Presentations, Edutopia, and many more than I care to admit. It gives me a huge thrill when, in the course of a conversation, I can say “Wait a minute! There was an article about that a couple of months ago!” and whip the magazine in question out of the drawer.
Thing is, just about all of the periodicals in question are in Proquest now. And instead of having to remember which magazine it was in, which issue, and what page, and then trot down to the photocopier to make an article, I can instead do a search, find it, and either print the plain text or, when possible, print a PDF of the article. (That has the added advantage of the good advertisements still being intact.)
Still, I remain awfully skeptical of digital storage. My old magazines will be readable for much longer than the content will be relevant. And I don’t need a fast Internet connection to take advantage of them, either. I’ve also listened to Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper(here at Amazon.com), who documents the destruction of hundreds of thousands of pages of print media after converting to other formats for archiving, only to have many of the archived versions to be of lesser quality or more easily degraded than the original materials.
Hmmm. I’ll let you know when I finally pull the plug. If.