Cleaning up the archive
It has been on my list for over one year, but a recent visit to THE archives pushed me to clean up some of my own archives. For a while I have been digitizing what I can and trash as much paper as possible. At the Esri office(s) we have great copiers/printers/scanners of the all-in-one type: enter that old stack of papers and out comes an email with pdf attached. Very handy indeed.
For some peculiar reason I cannot throw away maps or atlases. In my defense: they are kind of hard to digitize anyway. I have not made many maps myself, but would like to think I have helped many others to create maps. The map above is an ink drawing of the EU at the times. They made us draw all kinds of maps in college, although digitization had already set in. I did scan a few computer-generated maps of the times as well, but I need to prep those scans a bit more. Maybe ink wasn’t such a bad idea after all – from an archivist’s perspective.
NB: first ever blogpost from my iPad. It is a true revelation and can only increase ones admiration of Apple as a company and Steve Jobs as creator and entrepreneur. I get his dislike of copycats as well. I have yet to read his autobiography – who took that from our home ? – but I am sure I will.