I’ve recently started writing for the local paper. My wife wants me to preserve my work.
I don’t want to just shove clippings in a photo album from CVS. On the other hand, it’s not like they need to keep for 100 years, either (I seriously doubt that my great-grandkids will care about my opinion of a community theater production of Lost in Yonkers).
So is there a (fairly) inexpensive storage method that will prevent yellowing and disintegration, at least for a while?
Don’t save the paper, save the story. Scan it in. Either save it as an image file, or use ocr to convert it to a text file and save that. Put it on a CD or DVD.
If you want to preserve the actual paper, rather than scanning or photographing the page, you’ll need to neutralize and buffer the paper’s acidity or it will go yellow, brittle and self-destruct fairly rapidly.
One product that I have used successfully for this is Bookkeeper deacidification spray. It’s expensive, but having been on the market for 20+ years, it seems to be time-tested. There’s also a product from Krylon called “Make it Acid-Free” that’s about half the price. I have no first-hand experience with it, but it will probably keep the paper in decent shape for longer than files on a CD will be readable.
Then a few years down the line, you get to try to figure out how to get a file off a CD or DVD. Got any Zip drives laying around? 5.25" or 3.5" floppy drives? My laptop doesn’t have an optical drive right now, and I’m guessing it won’t be long until I don’t own a DVD/BluRay player. That’s also assuming your optical discs hold up over time.
I’d scan them and keep them backed up on a HD (and move that data along to new archive systems as I get them), but all in all I’d rather try to preserve the paper than put my only copy on a CD.
I can’t imagine these weren’t originally typed on a computer so you have the text. External HD are cheap now. You can get one that would store more then you would ever write in a lifetime of < $100. You can likely get various USB sticks for next to nothing. They tend to give these things out at various functions.
If you want the actual look of the article form the news paper I’d suggest either scanning it and saving the image or just making a xerox copy of it so it wasn’t on newsprint. Newsprint, as others have said, doesn’t age well at all. And I’d think regular bond paper ages much better even than deacidified newsprint. You can make copies at Kinkos or whatever you have in your area though you can get a scanned for not too much either.
I’ve seen plenty of old newspapers. Throw them in a box and put them in the attic, or some place dry and dark. They’ll last until your kids have kids at least. Like others said, you already have the text on your computer somewhere, so you’re really just saving the context.
And don’t discount the “cool factor” of old newspapers. I at least find it quite interesting to see what things cost in the 1940s, or what plays were running in town in 1918, or what silly styles were being advertised in the 70s. The fact that your work is in there would make it even more interesting for family members. So I suggest keeping the whole paper. Perhaps scanning the page(s) your writing is printed on just in case.
Honestly, the easiest thing to do would be to just write down the date and name of the paper. I expect most libraries and the publisher itself would have accessible archives (online, or microfilm) whenever you want to look at them again. But if it really matters, don’t trust someone else to back up your data.
I’ve saved four decades worth of work that’s appeared in print. Scan it, save it in multiple formats (.jpg, .pdf, html, and anything else you can think of) and then copy it onto a CD, SD card, USB drive, etc. And everytime a new format is introduced, you can use the overlap period in technology to copy it from the old format to the new.
BTW, I still have a 3.5" drive on my desktop, and I believe somewhere in the house we still have a Zip drive.
My understanding is that the fragility of newsprint has been much exaggerated. Somehow they became convinced in the 1950s that newspapers were going to deteriorate into nothing, and after microfilming them destroyed the archives, to the regret of researchers like myself. But newsprint gets brittle on the edges and then the deterioration slows to nearly nothing.
Put your original clippings in Mylar sleeves; put photocopies of them in a file folder, and don’t worry about it.
Why not scan and print on high quality paper?
Photocopies of the articles? My grandparents have photocopies of all kinds of things, some are from the mid 1970s and are not brittle or yellowed.
Are there still Kinkos anywhere?
I have family clippings from newspapers that approach 100 years old. Yes, they are brittle, but are readable and fascinating to see in their original context.
Neatly clip them out and date them somehow. Save them in a dry place.
Scanning would be a bonus that allows you to access them quickly and share with others.
You probably know them by their new name.
Newsprint has varied enormously in quality and acidity over the past couple of centuries. I’ve seen newspapers from the 1840s that are still white and supple, and papers from the 1940s that are now little piles of brownish-yellow scraps.
One of my part-time jobs some years ago was working on a newspaper inventory project for a largish historical society with an extensive collection of newspapers for their region. We found some volumes that the mere act of turning a page could cause that page to shatter into fragments, while volumes of similar age from nearby towns, stored under similar conditions, had relatively few problems.
The late 1940s and into the 1950s was the period when librarians first started really active efforts to share copies of materials with other institutions–you didn’t necessarily have to travel to Worcester, Mass., to use the American Antiquarian Society collections, e.g., because your own local library could purchase or borrow microfilm copies of the most popular materials. Then the librarians had to decide whether the originals, having been preserved on microfilm, still had “intrinsic” value as artifacts that justified devoting enormous quantities of space to seldom-used and deteriorating material. When budgets started getting tighter, this became harder to justify; the Kansas Historical Society, e.g., sold off their collection of microfilmed original newspapers in the 1990s. Popular titles brought good money; long runs of small-town papers went for a song or remained unsold.
“[N]ewsprint gets brittle on the edges and then the deterioration slows to nearly nothing” describes SOME newsprint at SOME locations and periods; it is not descriptive of all newspapers. Librarians became convinced of the deterioration of newsprint because they saw it happening; the very act of handling the papers to film them caused much damage to pages that were brittle through and through, and badly discolored as well.
Mylar/polyester sleeves are okay for clippings, but they don’t have any sort of alkaline buffer; in really low-quality newsprint, the acids that form within the paper itself will eventually destroy the paper (and the static charge in the Mylar can cause further damage, particularly if you ever want to remove the clipping from the sleeve).
Thank you everyone for the advice.
Yes, I do specifically want to save the items as displayed on the newspaper page rather than saving the data in an electronic file (I’m already doing that, anyway).
I’m embarrassed to admit that I did’t think of photocopying.
Dr. Cube: Especially good points, duly noted.