Archive Corps -- Saving what is in danger of disappearing

Many of you know that the Internet Archive is one of my favorite resources, Internet Archive -- a FREE gem that just keeps getting better!

It was again in the news recently when there was an effort to preserve part of a machinery manuals collection, Introducing the Archive Corps.

Jason Scott has something of a reputation. He’s a historian who works for the Internet Archive, and he’s known in some circles as the guy who can save bits of history right before they disappear.

So when he found out that a small store in Maryland that sold manuals for machinery was going out of business, and was going to get rid of its collection of nearly 200,000 obscure booklets in just a few days, Scott got to work.

He got to Maryland on a Friday to check out the stockpile at Manuals Plus. By Wednesday of the next week he had rallied over 70 volunteers to put together 1,600 boxes of manuals (nobody counted exactly how many booklets fill those boxes, but the guess is between 50,000 and 75,000) that now sit in three storage containers. The whole endeavor cost about $9,000, most of which was donated to the project...

Read the full article for full details.

As far as the aforementioned Archive Corps, right now there is a basic page where you can join a mailing list which I assume will be used to inform about future emergency preservation efforts.  I’ve signed up and will keep you posted.

I don’t know about you and I cannot even imagine what tech has become obsolete or history has been lost just in the time that it’s taken me to write this blog post.  It is truly too scary to consider ...

Do you know of other individuals or organizations who can in a pinch jump in to help at-risk archival materials?  Upfront with NGS is always happy to publicize such efforts.

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