Archivists don’t always talk about it, but you have to do refreshes occasionally if you really want your stuff to survive. Pawing through piles, blowing off dust, scrubbing down computers. It doesn’t matter how nice your facility is but you have to do these things. And my facility (my house) ain’t so nice. I’ve been going through my collections/projects in my office and found a bunch of stuff that I have to get moving on.

Among this is cd.textfiles.com, that erstwhile collection of shareware CD-ROMs and CD-ROM-based archive stuff that has ballooned well past every other site on textfiles.com. Weighing in around 205gb, it’s just a monster to deal with. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is I’m about to triple its size.

Some time ago, I was asked to provide ISO images of these CD-ROMs where possible, providing pristine digital captures of the data. I agreed, along with label scans and the rest. These will be added to cd.textfiles.com over time. Additionally, I’ll be adding Apple Macintosh disks, in some way that makes sense. (It’s a little weird to add them.) I have over 100 of those to add. And their ISOs.

So really, there’s this cascading flood of data I’m about to blow out onto the net. It’s going to make a lot more stuff available. It’s going to be quite exciting. It’s also meant I bought another hard drive I’m installing into the server, a 750gb, to handle all this incoming data.

This, and all the similar issues I’m encountering, are delightful crises; the problem of too much stuff, the problem of too much interesting things to do, the problem of so many things to accomplish. My days are not filled with aimless wandering; they’re filled with excitement of wondering which amazing thing to work on, and how much more of stuff to add to the piles.

It’s a busy bunch of months ahead, indeed.

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