Yes, documenting the mail-art you send out is something that is important. Also because all you send out normally never gets returned. So from the beginning in the 80-ies I have been documenting all with photos, and I now have albums full with photos. Thousands of photos that illustrate what I have sent out. The last three years I have access to a scanner, so I am now digitizing most of the things that I send out. Also some of the things I get in. The TAM Archive surely has a lot of items in digital form now as well. These BLOGS are also a nice example of how things become accessible in digital format. But remember that Yahoo (they own Blogger) can change the rules when the BLOGGERS need too much space. The same happened with the sites on Geocities. The free sites were completely overtaken with advertisings and that way a lot of older digital published materials are gone now.
So documenting things in a BLOG is just a temporary thing. You need your own Domain and site (and the finances to keep it online) to make all available for others online.
The best documents are the DVD's that I make with the materials that I have in digital format. I have witnessed the changes of digital formats when it comes to storing the data. I started with punchhole cards in the 70-ies, the cassettes, the first harddisk, the 5,25 inch diskettes, then changed to 3,5 inch, the ZIP-disks, the CD's and CD-R's, and now the DVD+R-2L disks. Just read that they are making new disks soon with a capacity of 1,6 TBytes. So documenting things in a digital way will be something worth considering.
Ruud
2 comments:
Ruud... Yeah, early on I kept a log of what I'd sent...later, I kept computer files on floppy discs, that are no longer accessible. (I've got stuff on hard drives that would need professional retrieval) These days, I just send... We're creating a new job... the "forensic archivist"...
Since I am new to mailart, I had no idea what documentation meant. However, because I am getting old and forgetful, I keep a journal of the things that arrive and the things I mail out. It is amazing how helpful this log has become. I really do totally forget what I have done! This from a person who in her youth could remember every single day and all the events that filled those days going all the way back to childhood! Maybe I used up all my memory cells for one allotted life time?
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