A few years ago, I bought a mini-PC and set it up as a dedicated digitization machine. The intention was to have a separate machine that could handle document/photo/film scanning and audio (and maybe video) digitization in the background while I worked on other things. It served its purpose nicely, but then life intervened and I went a long period without doing any digitization.

Then, a few weeks ago I decided it was time to return to the digitization fold and went to boot up my machine… but it just sat there. After some back-and-forth with support, it was determined I should return my machine (sans SSD for privacy’s sake) in exchange for a replacement. The generous 3-year warranty still applied since my machine was a little under 2 1/2 years old.

Now, I’m back up and running. Not exactly full-speed, but I’m getting back into the groove. I’ve got a pile of documents from WMWC waiting to be scanned and a bunch of unlabeled cassettes to go through and see if they need digitization, not to mention boxes and boxes of family history in the form of photos, film, and slides.

Some of my favorite things to digitize are those random, seemingly unimportant things1 that are probably not being clamored for by researchers or hobbyists, but may offer a deeper insight into a topic at an unknown future time. Like a pair of documents I found among the WMWC pile. They were actually from a completely different college station, the University of Connecticut’s WHUS, but were likely requested by WMWC staff 40 years ago as part of a networking/information-gathering mission to see what larger college stations were doing at the time:

I also recently scanned a personal item, a random notebook from my sophomore year of college in the fall of 1995. It contained a bunch of notes from my early computer science courses about how to convert decimal numbers into any other base and a description of “the InterNet.” It also featured a bunch of WMWC-related notes, lyrics that I wrote (many of which ended up as proper songs), a site map of of a new web site I was planning out, and even a page with a list of grievances I had with my roommate at the time, in preparation for a discussion he and I had, mediated by our RA. This notebook won’t wind up on the Internet Archive, but it will sit in my own personal archive for any future weirdo that wants to look at it.

Scrawled sitemap for a web site in the works
This plan would eventually manifest as this beautiful mid-90s web monstrosity, featuring audio clips, which were quite rare at the time.

My digitization rig is pretty modest, but it does the trick for good-enough citizen archival and personal digitization work:

My digitization rig, described below

I have additional pieces of equipment that I can hook up as needed (turntables, 8-track player, 4-track recorder, VHS/Mini-DV players2/cameras, assorted hard drive adapters, etc.), but the above is what’s always connected and ready to go.

It’s nice to be scanning documents and running tapes through again. We all think about our legacy and while it’s not the most important piece of mine, I do feel like digitizing 40-year-old radio station docs, an 1894 book on palmistry that my great-aunt randomly gave me as a kid, or the tape of my wife interviewing the Indigo Girls is a nice little piece of it. If nothing else, it shows that I’ve always cared about the small details most others wouldn’t give a second thought to and that’s something I’d like people to remember about me.

  1. This is why I often refer to myself as a “preserver of unimportant things” before anything else. I find the most importance in the seemingly mundane, ignored ephemera. ↩︎

  2. Mini-DV has been the biggest pain. I want to avoid transferring using analog cables and use the original Firewire connection to do it digitially. However, this is a gigantic pain that I haven’t been able to make work in over ten years, even when using this extensive/expensive series of cables. ↩︎