ASCII by Jason Scott

Archiving 3,500 Hours of Stupid — November 9, 2015

The title has little context, which I think is appropriate.

One of my friends in high school insisted, nay, demanded that I listen to an album called A BIG 10-8 PLACE, which was either about or by something called Negativland, which I didn’t have a clue as to what that could mean, and before I could really absorb that, I had to hear the album, and oh man.

I can’t even easily describe this album. It’s primarily a set of audio collage, some of the finest that can blow through headphones, with ridiculous self-reference and unusual disturbing moments. It was just a game and life-changer for me, some crazy kid in 1986, a mere 16 years old and up to that point living with Art of Noise as my most wild band.

I bought a number of Negativland albums over the years, and in college, by a very, very lucky set of circumstances, I got to attend an actual, live, Negativland concert at The Western Front in Cambridge, MA – one of their rare East Coast appearances. I showed up way too early, and met the band.

I’m compressing time insanely – sorry about that, but my personal life with this band is not important to the main points other than to say that it’s progressed on to what will now be a life with Negativland for 30 years next year: 1986-2016.

Along the way, I saw them live a handful of times, and in one case, even put the entire band up in my house in Waltham when they had some Boston appearances. The whole band! In my house! What fan wouldn’t love that?

Maybe I’ve just hit that age where I approach liking different bands to “take it or leave it” – you either listen and are grabbed, or you listen and say “not for me”. But if you like clever or really brilliant sound collage, cultural ridiculing combined with satirical commentary, and the occasional burst of disturbing, intense music, then you may enjoy Negativland.

Along the way, I’ve become really close with one of the members, Mark Hosler, who I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with in various locations, and who has never failed to delight me with his presence. Kevin Smith says “Don’t meet your heroes” but what I counter with is “Get better heroes.”

In the middle of 2015, one of the members of Negativland, Don Joyce, passed away, at the age of 71. He was amazing in his own right. There are some really excellent obituaries and memories out there, and again, I’m not going to add to them here.

What I’m going to do is tell you about how this nearly-30-years-long fan got the chance at the dream of his lifetime, when he was able to leverage his position at a very large, very open network-connected archive to bring forward a collection of Negativland and Don’s work that nobody ever thought would be in one place.

It’s called the Over the Edge Collection.

See, during the time he was in Negativland and doing a lot of sound work with the band, Don was also the host of a weekly radio show in KPFA called “Over the Edge” – an hours-long sound collage of themes, commentary and thrown-into-the-mix listeners that he called Over the Edge. That’s three to five hours a week, every week, for decades. Unique enough as a show, it’s definitely unique in the consistency and execution of his vision. He did his last show, died a few days later, and various people from the band and long-time collaborators showed up and did the very next show entitled THERE IS NO DON, and the show was announced as continuing in some form, but the era of Don Joyce was over.

There were scads and scads of recorded shows from the many years, some of which had been remixed into sold items for the Negativland Seeland Records catalog, but which the vast, vast majority had not seen the light of day since broadcast.

Until now.

Working with the Band’s Archivist, Tim Maloney, who has painstakingly digitized tapes for years, the Internet Archive now has up over 3,000 hours (THREE THOUSAND HOURS) of this radio show. It’d take you a good part of a year to listen to it all.

There are now lots of articles about this hosting of all this material (I particularly like this one), but there’s two things I wanted to address before I set you off to it.

First, I work for such a great place that adding 941 shows of hundreds of megabytes of audio each wasn’t even a rounding error – I didn’t have to bring it up with a single person before I helped do it. This dream of Don’s and others in the band, that all the Over the Edge material would be up somewhere, instantly listenable, came true in hours as the hard drive uploaded the items.

The Archive’s derivers convert all incoming audio to various forms, including .ogg and related formats, as well as generating waveforms and just generally trying to give listeners the most options. It is now possible to listen to all 941 shows (with more coming) and not have to hit a paywall, a banner ad, a rate limiter, or any other barrier. It might be worth considering to donate to such a generous organization.

Second, you need to realize that a band this meticulous, this directed in their focus and approach and art, was making a huge and ridiculous leap when they just threw up these thousands of hours of shows. Up to this point, they’ve crafted nearly every second the public heard of their work, and so presentation was done at great pains and effort. And then, a short time after Don’s passing, we are suddenly given all of these items with, in some cases, almost no descriptions at all.

The choice was pretty clear – only release what had gone through rigorous metadata refinement, fully describing and cataloging this collection until it was 100% ready to go as a perfect crystalline museum piece… or just dump everything up there and figure it out later. It was very difficult to do a 180 and put it all up as is.

As a result, there’s a call for help in describing these shows. Don only described a percentage, and efforts by fans new and old to describe these shows would be appreciated. It might take years, or a few insane weeks, but the literal life’s work of Don and the members of Negativland (and many many others, I rush to say) deserves the community it should get.

Let’s get Stupid.

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The Internet Archive Telethon — November 4, 2015

I’ve been given permission to go ahead and schedule an Internet Archive Telethon to allow us to have a gosh-darn-it actual showcase at the amazing space that is the San Francisco headquarters. My goal, humble as always, is to try and raise a million dollars for the Archive in a weekend.

To do this, there will be a live telethon from noon on Saturday, December 19th to noon on Sunday, December 20th. I will be co-hosting with others, and it will be quite a hoot.

I’m now working on stuff regarding logistics for it, but I’m letting people know about it because of two reasons:

FIRST. If you know or are a group who makes use of the Internet Archive, either hosting with the Archive, or are a prominent name (I’ll leave the definition of that to you), then please write me at telethon@textfiles.com and let me know your ideas for an act, appearance, pre-recorded message, or other contribution that will be good to have during the live streaming.

Second, if you donate to the Internet Archive in advance of the Telethon, and include the phrase LOCKBOX in your donation, it will be added to the Telethon’s pre-telethon “Lockbox” and that will give us the initial boost towards the goal.

I’ll return to my regularly scheduled weblog shortly.

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In Realtime: Some Initial Sorting and The Power of Two — September 2, 2015

I drove down to Baltimore yesterday, sorted manuals for the day, and then drove back.

First, I stopped by the Manuals Plus warehouse to see the current status of the manuals that we left behind. Answer: Gone. Thrown out. Recycled.

So there you go – that’s what would have happened if we’d not organized and arrived within 5 days of being told it was being thrown out. Except, of course, we got quite a bit of things before having to leave the rest behind.

I’ve seen some share of criticism of this process, but people need to remember that whole “It was Friday and I was told it would be thrown out on Wednesday” thing. Spoiler: It’s kind of vital to why we had to work we did at the speed we did. And the outcome was really nice.

The manuals we saved are in three storage units at a storage place down the road from the warehouse. I planned to go to the units, and work with whoever showed up. As it turned out, one person showed up.

The reasons for this are obvious – little relative warning, middle of the day, etc. But there we were – me and Eric and a storage unit full of stuff:

We did just this unit for the day, because of two main reasons: There were only two of us, and my back is still in very rough shape from the initial load-out.

There were a notable amount of people horrified that the boxes were sitting straight on the concrete – apparently outside of flood risk, concrete has a habit of transmitting moisture through the ground to whatever’s sitting on it. Something had to be done, and we went with wooden pallets.

Only $3 apiece! We bought twenty.

Then it was a “simple matter” of us going through all the boxes in the storage unit and making a very quick determination if it was “Hewlett-Packard”, “Tektronix”, or “Other”. You see… there’s an awful lot of HP materials – like thousands of manuals. Same for Tektronix. Those should be noted and set up to be mostly near each other, while I figure out the next move.

The result of a full day’s work was this:

Everything’s on wood now. Stuff is still piled a little high, but we sorted it out, so there’s a clear set of “HP/Tektronix” piles and then piles and other stuff. (Any situation where these HP/Tektronix items go to another home will require a last QA check to make sure other manuals aren’t in there too.) We labelled as best we can, so that eventually, the HP might have its own unit, while the brand names on the box will make scanning choices slightly better.

It was a hot box. I sweat. A lot. This was sweat:

But ultimately, we hit a good break point – the boxes are better than the initial load-in. Now I just need to come back down and do the rest. I also have a lot of calls to make to engineering museums, libraries, archives, and other groups I know. These things need a permanent home that doesn’t have the word “EZ-Storage” at the front of it.

I drove 570 miles in 24 hours just now to do this shoring up.

Totally worth it.

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8-Bit Generation – It Lives. (And has a Kickstarter.) — September 1, 2015

Way back in 2012, I posted something, talking about how worried I was that a documentary that looked and sounded great seemed to have disappeared. I’d looked far and wide to contact the filmmakers, and nothing. But I wanted to at least put my voice out there, in case they wanted to talk to me. Unlike people who talked big about what they wanted to do, the small amount of footage I’d seen from the documentary looked so fantastic that I very nearly quit doing documentaries.

Like a lot of people, I’d pre-ordered the blu-ray edition for the forthcoming film, and I’d waited. And waited, and then nothing came of it, websites went down, and I squirreled away the trailer and other footage I’d seen, sad beyond belief such a promising work seemed to be doomed, destined for the shadows of promises and wishes.

Then, in 2014, I got contacted by one of the creators. Yes, they were alive. Yes, they had a lot of pieces of the movie. And yes, they’d run into incredible financial problems, gone bankrupt, lost homes, had massive layoffs… yes, as expected, there had been some incredible shitshow and the production company was essentially gone. They’d had to go into other directions, and put the project into a box and refund whatever they could afford to refund, and make a living.

So, they’d contacted me, asking if I knew anything that could be done. They were paralyzed. They had footage, and major swaths were done, but the project needed more resources to finish, and anyway, everybody in the world hated them for how it’d all blown up.

Here’s what I’m telling them, and what I’m telling you.

There’s really three choices at a juncture like this. They are:

Never touch it again. Everything disappears. Gone.
Edit and put together something salable, even if less ambitious.
Dump all the footage into the Internet.

We agreed that the first was a horrible situation and should be avoided at all costs. Not even an actual option, really, even though at that moment it was the easiest.

The third was (and still is) an option but really should be a last and final resort, since raw footage is hardly the kind of thing to educate like a film would, would be of interest to a tiny, tiny audience of nerds who like to listen to people cough and act confused, and ultimately would be a shame considering all of the work that went into it.

That left the idea of putting something together. That won.

I then talked to the XOXO festival organizers, suggesting that maybe it would be interesting to have one of the producers come from Italy to show some footage for the first time and show what happened. They heartily agreed. This is what happened:

Here’s the resulting presentation:

After that, Bruno (the one on stage) headed back to Italy and they began trying to put together a plan for how to put the movie out, however they could.

So they announced a kickstarter last week. Here is a link to the Kickstarter.

As of this writing, it’s a little less than halfway there. (I tend to use Kicktraq to see trends and understand how it’s all going.)

Let’s make it clear: I gave these folks something like $100 for the pre-order a couple years back. That money is gone. Gone, gone, gone. I lost my $100. But now, in the present day, I have given $100 to them again for this kickstarter.

Am I a sucker? Am I a rube? No, I’m somebody who has seen the footage, knows how fleeting and fragile documentary projects can be, and I want to see this thing live.

There is footage in here of Jack Tramiel, talking about his time running Commodore and Atari. I can’t begin to tell you how rare this is. Jack is quite gone – he died soon after they filmed him. He would never talk to anyone about his time there, and certainly not on camera. Just that alone would make me give hundreds to ensure some version of this film is made.

But there are so many interesting behind the scenes folks, people who were managers and logistics and programmers and employees, besides folks who are the big names you would hope to see. This is a breathtaking accomplishment. I want to see something of this come out.

There are spectacularly angry people out there about how this has all gone down to the present moment. They paid money and the money is gone. They want some apologies and they want some consideration. I told the creators this – that there would be a wave of outrage. I’ve seen what people do over $10 – what they do over $75 or $100 would be close to murderous. They are going to end up giving away a lot of free copies of this movie at the end of this.

But you have to take the lashings, the earned punches and the screams. There’s no way for that to be avoided (and frankly it shouldn’t). But out the other end, one hopes, just enough people will step forward and provide enough money to make this happen.

Again, here’s the kickstarter. The choice is yours.

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A Little Bit of the Manuals — August 25, 2015

Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentation and equipment. It’s definitely the all-around best advice, and was, in fact, truly unique: nobody else brought it up.

The advice, basically, was this: be very careful how you promote the release of these manuals and portray the extent of the collection, because your ability to get attention combined with the fragility of the remaining manual businesses means you could cause the long-running family businesses to close. In other words, there’s a non-zero chance that loose words could sink a shrinking market fast enough to devastate the remaining players. And, additionally, not all of those remaining players will be as generous and patient as Manuals Plus was.

That’s the kind of good advice I like to get.

So let me be very clear that the collection of manuals collected from Manuals Plus is not a comprehensive collection of all electronics or even testing equipment manuals that ever existed, and while effort will be made to scan much of the collection and upload it to the Internet Archive, it will be done while being mindful of groups selling paper copies of the manuals, or making duplicates of rare manuals for a fee.

I also expect to become a very reluctant expert in who has what, which companies flip their lid about their manuals being online, and what kind of life you lead when you have 3 storage units 200 miles away full of paper you wrecked your back hauling. I’ll be sure not to be shy about it.

But let’s talk about a secret thing I did, and what the immediate benefit is.

So, a bunch of people generously sent support funds over to the jason@textfiles.com Paypal address, many of them sending money just for the idea the work was being done, and that money was critical to success, as it allowed for the rental of storage space, my hotel room for three days, and the ordering of 1,250 banker boxes, not to mention the cost of the movers and properly tipping the movers. It was as vital a component as possible.

So, when I got back, I thought about those people. They’d spent good money to help with this, just sending what they were comfortable with. And for them, they would only see the results when we got to digitizing stuff and putting it up.

I thought I could do better.

So I contacted the people who sent paypal money during the project, and told them what I’m telling you now: After we’d finished moving the 1,600 boxes (final number) out of the warehouse, and after we’d cleaned the thing up, and after I’d left some gifts for the owner and the employee of Manuals Plus to thank them for three days of generosity, and knowing that when we walked out of there, there was an extremely positive chance that most if not all of the remaining manuals would be pulped and turned into hamster cage liners or whatever.,….. I took some manuals. Actually, I took a lot of manuals.

I then contacted all the generous backers and told them if they wrote me, I’d send them a manual.

I figured in a kickstarter world, even if you had the proper attitude of supporting the project for the project’s sake, it would be a nice bonus if they could be offered a real, honest, was-going-to-be-destroyed vintage manual going back as far as World War II. So I went through the shelves and took two large boxes of manuals, intending them to then be sent to backers who’d responded. And a lot have.

I’ve ordered nice rigid envelopers to use for shipping, and I’ve begun stuffing them with vintage manuals and marking which contributors get their manuals sent. But then I hit another mental problem of exquisite paranoia.

What if I had unique manuals anyway?

What if there had been a series of oversights and a couple unique manuals, not in the storage units, were in the collection I had? What if I and the people I would be sending these to didn’t really look it up? What if the manuals were then stored and lost anyway, and I’d played a part?

Anyway, and that’s how I ended up scanning in a few manuals tonight.

After I’ve scanned them, the copies of them all go out. This will slow things slightly, but I think we all agree it’s a better way to go. Additionally, all these scans will be of manuals I thought in some way beautiful, so you can judge me.

So let’s go!

If you don’t like these, well, I have 50,000 more for you not to like. And if you love these, good news is ahead….

But as we begin to see this project bearing fruit for the world, it’ll be most interesting to me to see the reaction. Will it be loved by a tiny few and ignored by the world? Will the manuals, online, be re-purposed into great works of art and commentary? Or will a simple manual with seemingly no major controversy or role cause someone to come blasting forth with an amazing story?

We’ll see. In the meantime, keep an eye out as more manuals join the fray before being mailed to their generous backers.

Please note: Again, you are welcome to send more donations via paypal to jason@textfiles.com for this and some amount of future projects, but the amount of manuals is limited and may already be out. Please don’t assume one will be mailed out at this point. Good news about reading them online, though.

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Digitize the Planet — August 24, 2015

I know it’s been announcement city over here for the past week and a half. Here’s the last piece in the puzzle: trying to solve the biggest looming problem for online libraries and archives.

So, people get it: When items are online, they become infinitely more useful. They can transfer instantly, they can be viewed through a wide variety of means, and automatic scripts and robots can have their way with the data, producing all sorts of additional information by analyzing them. Digital is good. Digital is top-shelf fantastic, actually. Digital’s the way to go.

But.

Once people realize that digital is the way to go, they assume institutions like the Internet Archive, with its massive scanning operations and other ingestion abilities, must be able to work like Doc Brown’s Mr. Fusion.

Nnnnnnnope.

I mean, make no mistake, the Archive can digitize a hell of a lot, and there’s a pile of projects going on right now – they digitize a thousand books every single day, and they’re duping records, videocassettes and other media in at a fantastic rate. But as this happens, so does word that things are available, and then a grateful and well-meaning audience wants to send even more stuff into the machine to be processed.

And as people achieve enlightenment about the awesomeness of the archive, they start assuming that sending in 20-30 crates of “stuff” means that stuff will just slip into the stacks with no issues. And at some point, unless there’s funding attached, that’s just not going to be true. There’s a line at the door, trust me.

Meanwhile, the Archive’s machines and servers can provide instant, accessible homes to digital files almost instantly – if you upload an .ISO, or a PDF or a MP3 file, it knows just what to do. And when you add the metadata/information about that file, we end up with a nice little entry indeed. That is going incredibly well.

So here’s my solution, which I hope is obvious:

Teach everyone to digitize.

Tell people what tools, practices, and methods they need to turn stuff in their house or place of business into digital files. Give them links to the software that will work on their platform of choice. Provide tips for getting the best capture. Inform them about the importance of descriptions and how that’s done. And for people who are with unusual formats or who don’t feel comfortable with the above, give them links to people and places who are comfortable and can work with them to make it work.

And tell them all the related stuff, too – how to digitize without destroying the originals, how to track down rare stuff or verify it’s not already online, and how to be hero of your particular culture or community in getting it stored away.

In doing this, a whole range of disparate, non-specific pages out there that cover this and that will be added into a central clearinghouse of CC0-licensed information that will spread far and wide.

It’s the next logical step.

So, it is with great pleasure I announce the DIGITIZE THE PLANET WIKI.

http://digitize.archiveteam.org

Naturally, as it has been up for about 3 hours, it’s very scant. A lot has to be added. But collaborating, and with clear goals in place, I expect to begin assembling a large amount of information in a short period of time. It’s all out there, after all.

The goal is that a person with neat “stuff”, or thousands of such people, can begin going after a whole range of materials and bring them online, for the world to share. Let’s turn this into a flood, a massive wave of items that had no advocate, who have no foundation to grant them immortality. I’d love to see placemats, training VHS tapes, old cassettes, and all the knowledge of the underground and overlands get into the Archive (and other repositories).

It’s the future. Building a library, together.

Let’s see how it goes.

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In Realtime: Post-Mortem — August 23, 2015

I’m just keeping the theme with the title. Future postings will be less obscure.

This is a wrap up and list of conclusions after this grand experiment.

And an announcement.

But first things first.

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WARNING TIME.

In my inbox, going back over a year (and going back years in my mail archives) are people letting me know about Stuff Going Away. When you’re known as someone who rails against needless lost of information and history, it stands to reason that folks will come running with news of most anything shutting down anywhere.

That’s how I was told there was some place with manuals that was going out of business at some point. And that’s how I mailed them last year, and that’s how I was on the phone with Becky, first and last employee of the Maryland edition of Manuals Plus, on a Wednesday. By Friday, I was visiting the warehouse. And by Monday, it was me and dozens of people loading things into boxes.

I stress this because one needs to understand both the timeline and the swiftness of the operation that ensued, because a lot of criticisms or suggestions were simply not possible in the time given. That Said, I am happy to have them for the next time something like this crosses my life. It just wasn’t possible with such a small amount of warning.

Regarding warning: Yes, I was told that this place was closing, and in theory I could have cooked up some plans in the previous months, but the problem was the closing deadline kept shifting. Originally, there was talk of March 2015, and it wasn’t until August 2015 it was getting serious, like Becky calling me and telling me I better move on it immediately serious. It was easily possible that the owner might have decided to keep it. And this was not one of the major things on my radar my year – not even close. So that’s why it wasn’t until the Friday before that I found myself in the warehouse.

Which brings me to:

IN PERSON TRUMPS E-MAIL AND PHONE EVERY TIME

Here’s Becky and I during the load. Becky and I had talked a couple times on the phone and multiple times on e-mail, but I could tell that with the owner, Nick, there needed to be a human being in the warehouse and not promises on the phone. I’m sure I’m not the only one with memories of someone talking grandiose schemes and solutions over the phone or in e-mail, building castles in the air. The problem is that it’s very easy for people to shoot out a bunch of promises, which are wishes instead of plans. I hopped into my car and drove 400 miles round trip for a one-hour conversation. That’s the big difference. Nick was affable in person, talked straight, and when I shared my ideas, he was all for it.

This was not a simple “whatever”, either. He was essentially saying “feel free to run wild in my storeroom I paid a lot of money for years earlier, and take whatever you want to”. That’s an enormous amount of trust to visit upon someone. And I think that showing I was willing to make that trip was what convinced him, as was my very long days being accessible and running things during the load-out week.

And that leads to the plan.

THE PLAN WAS TO GET THINGS AS STABLE AS POSSIBLE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AS EASILY AS POSSIBLE.

The shifting factor was the warehouse. The time constraint was the warehouse closing. Whatever could be done to stabilize those two situations was my priority.

Here, there could have been a wild amount of choices. If I’d had warning and could have talked to everyone I needed to at Internet Archive or another institution, I could have probably hired some tractor trailers, gotten some Gaylord containers (they’re huge, and forklift compatible), and just loaded the Gaylords up with documentation before sending it off to my institution’s warehouse.

Or I could have a pile of warehouses ready to go, along with people who loaned trucks, and we could have been in there with a fleet of trucks ready to go. That is, if we’d known it was going to happen when it did. But we didn’t.

It’s the speed that was the key factor. That’s why I went for a local storage facility, a local moving company, and bouncing between them as fast as possible – the storage facility was stable (and under contract, not favors), and I could keep renting more space as it became obvious we had a gross underestimation of how much there was.

THERE WAS A LOT MORE STUFF THAN ORIGINALLY THOUGHT.

The “25,000 manuals” came from an estimate of “21,000 manuals” that I thought was low. We are sure this is 50,000 manuals and it may be many more. And when it came to amount, we had bought a wildly-over-the-top 252 banker’s boxes until we found out that we really needed about 1,700. Nearly every estimate was low: the amount of stuff, the amount of boxes, how many people would be willing to show up, how many days we would have. This was all logistics 101, but that brings up the other positive:

WE WERE RIDICULOUSLY FLEXIBLE.

Over the three days, we could stay late, we could pack more, we could move more and we could stop and go as we needed to. We weren’t locked into some hard dates and time, and Nick was very kind to keep extending us since we were essentially saving him recycling money by taking maximum amounts of stuff away.

WE DIDN’T HAVE ONE GEEK BREAKDOWN.

We were so lucky. Having dozens of people, especially really intense personalities involved in something like this meant there was potential for a real world-class meltdown. Either an argument over how things were doing, a “I don’t like this person” tantrum, or just a general “could you please not <thing you actually kind of have to do>”. I’m not saying conflict didn’t happen – I’m sure some people avoided each other or someone decided they’d had enough and quietly left the proceedings. But we didn’t have a meltdown, and that is very, very appreciated.

I ENCOURAGED THE WALKABOUT.

When people came in, I offered for them to spend 5 minutes just taking the place in. It helps, if you’re going to volunteer and be doing a simple thing in the corner for an hour, to walk around and understand what you’re dealing with and why you want to do it. Some people got tours from me, others were happy to walk through themselves. Some looked, and immediately turned and said “WHAT DO I DO”, and, well, that’s cool too.

I LET PEOPLE PROVE THEMSELVES.

There were what I called “smart jobs” and “dumb jobs”, both of them vital. “Dumb jobs” didn’t require any particular training – things like “assemble these boxes out of cardboard” or “make sure there’s no empty boxes in the aisles”. The “Smart Jobs”, like “sort through these manuals to get the unique ones, including minor changes in revisions”, needed an eagle eye and endless concentration. Some people were up for that, others were not quite in the mood. There was also variant approaches, and some people took hours to do what others did in 15 minutes. That said, that was progress. By giving people lots of shelves to go over (there were over 300 shelves, after all), different approaches and skills with the sorting could co-exist. Also, people would go over other shelves that had been “done” and double check that was the case. It let us catch a lot.

FOOD. REST.

We ordered pizza a lot. One volunteer brought in coolers and drinks. And if someone had to walk outside or smoke or just sit down, we let them. This wasn’t some insane army with punishments for walking off – this was a volunteer effort and it wasn’t right to call it anything else.

YOU MUST ACCEPT THE SITUATION.

We did about 2+ months of work in 2 days. As I told each volunteer as they settled in, we were going to miss stuff, stuff was going to be destroyed, and yet every thing we picked out and put into a box would be, in some way, saved. If you launch into a project this large wanting the outcome to be 100% perfect, you’re going to have the aforementioned meltdown. You do your best – every move you take is improving the situation.

In the very rare cases where miscommunication meant someone had not pulled all the right things, it was trivial to have another person go through the shelf again. The attitude to take is that the second person wasn’t “fixing” the efforts of the first person – they were partners.

KEEP IT LIGHT.

People kept coming back because the goal was obvious, the environment was self-directed, and people could talk and share stories. This happened a lot – I walked into lots of geeky and informed conversations from people who were just thrown together. We had families come, and everyone was shown a good time. And where possible, I tried to be funny, except where I was annoying the hell out of people. Well, maybe I kept trying, anyway.

NEVER, EVER, EVER FAIL TO INDICATE HOW YOU WERE JUST A DOPE WITH AN IDEA AND 70 PEOPLE DID THE REAL WORK.

It’s an easy narrative/headline to say “Jason Scott saved this.” no, no way. If this had been just me, it’d be a tiny fraction of what got out. No, people worked their asses off, much harder than me, and it was because of these selfless people that we ended up with the collection we did.

PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU CAME AND ARE MISSING FROM THIS LIST.

The hundreds of people who sent in money to make it feasible to do all this.

Tim Skoczen, Reverend Ragnarok, Tom Miller, Darrell Kindred, Matthias Lee, Andrew Peterson, Mark Gifford, Rob “Deker” Dekelbaum, Rich Kulawiec, Anne N., Douglas Taylor, Effrem Norwood, Joe Hourcle, Brent Greissle, J. Alexander Jacocks, Jonathan Sturges, Pete Morici

AND NOW, A LITTLE ANNOUNCEMENT

One of the volunteers involved in the project, Daniel Siders, suggested that the goodwill and the interest in these types of project shouldn’t fade away with the completion of the main part of the Manuals Plus project. He instead proposed that there be something like Archive Team for physical rescues. Naturally, there’s a lot to learn in that space, but with a level of speed and radical approaches that worked for Archive Team, maybe something good will come of it.

Therefore, in one line, I announce: ArchiveCorps.

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A Small Dark Detour — August 21, 2015

As the story of the saved manuals gained steam, a greater audience of people began to be aware of it.

Once you get past a few thousand, people start showing up who…. don’t forward the conversation. I just wanted to talk a little bit about that situation of the modern era, since I consider it one of my areas of study. As always, it’s good to have two different things going on at any time, so besides the manual recovery project was a study in how the internet at large responds to it, especially when there’s no particular “group” to go ad hominem on. (Sadly, a rarer sight in the present day.)

Let’s set aside the people who were positive (and they were the VAST MAJORITY), neutral, or didn’t comment.

Negative comments came in several forms.

First, the general opinion of the exact value of the manuals themselves and whether it was worth this much effort to take them elsewhere. Some people questioned the use and utility, while others (I assume) wished there was a way to wave a magic wand that had an LED display on the side showing the value.

Next, there were deep concerns about the process of how this was being done, with a lot of informed opinion coming from viewing the photos. One particular winning comment mentioned the volunteers should “stop wasting time reading” because they saw a photo of the volunteers looking at manual revisions. Others dreamed up grandiose saving schemes that assumed, fundamentally, that money and labor would be there, a non-guaranteed situation at best.

Finally, there was a range of commentary about the Manuals Plus company itself, with judgments all along the line of their business sense, approach to this dissemination, and, in one case, yes, a veiled physical threat.

Obviously, considering how south things can go online, these are pretty minor disagreements. But they were strongly stated, intense, and reflective of how the medium seems to promote taking extreme stands. Subtlety isn’t welcome. Grace takes a back seat.

As someone who has grown up from the early days of consumer-grade online telecommunications to the present day, I don’t want to believe the patient is terminal. I want to hope that in the same way we no longer generally mess around with DNS settings like we used to and we no longer live under a financially ruinous telephone billing scheme, I’d hoped we’d start to have real, honest solutions to endless bad commentary issues other than “let the mob vote” and “hooray, we shut off comments, we are heroes”.

But more notable is that sense that people, faced with a situation going on, feel compelled to think they are a required part of the process, even if they contribute nothing more than literally noise. Paul Ford captured a lot of this in this essay in which he reveals that sense of “Why Wasn’t I Consulted” being a core value of the Internet as it is – that sense you’re a part of things that you are seriously not a part of.

The problem might be fundamentally human. Maybe there is no solution.

This was all a minor note, playing helplessly in the background, as a symphony of goodwill swelled around the world for this project. But it tells me there’s so much more to learn about this network we’ve built.

I’ll think about it, sleeping on this pile of manuals.

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In Realtime: It Is Done — August 20, 2015

When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high level news.

The goal, as you might recall, was to go into a closing warehouse of manuals, take as much as we could, and store it somewhere so that it could be properly “dealt with”, with the rest ending up in the trash.

We hit that goal. In total, the number of boxes is something between 1,600 and 1,700. These are boxes that each contain from a half-dozen to dozens of manuals, shop notes, catalogs and other related documents, mostly for testing equipment and electronics tools.

A few of us tried to do a very rough, very hand-wavy job of determining what the total number of manuals was, because it sure as hell wasn’t 25,000. At the end we decided that it is definitely over 50,000 and it is probably as high as 75,000. So we rescued twice as many items as I was told the room contained. That’s fantastic.

The amount of people who had walked in through the front door to volunteer help, some of them knowing nothing other than an address and that a friend had said “You must go there”, numbered at least 60. In some cases, entire families came – Mom, Dad, Daughter, Grandkids all being put to work to find duplicate manuals. Finding what a volunteer can best be used for is a bit of an art and not a science, but I did my best – some people were a little too roughed up to be lifters, and others were handed a task and went at it for 5 hours without a complaint or a break, building up a ruinous sweat.

I didn’t get a photo of everyone and it is going to be a crapshoot to get all the names up there, so when I do the postmortem and thanks, I expect to be modifying that posting for weeks.

My job was mostly to keep a lid on knowing how it was all going to pan out and to make sure our two main outside vendors, the moving company and the storage facility, didn’t give us any surprises.

Neither did.

To make things easier, I’d rented two, and then three spaces at a storage company a mile from the warehouse. It wasn’t one of the free ones people generously offered (and which were all between 30 and 60 miles away), but instead was a very quick staging and timeout location for getting things out of immediate danger. I’ll just repeat that, here: this is not the final home, just an easy place to start to look at the collection intelligently and carefully. In an ideal world, I’d have been let into the warehouse in January and would slowly have cataloged and worked through the whole place, and then began organizing the moves and future homes. But this went down in less than a week, and here we are.

There were a lot of great ideas that volunteers and collaborators came up with, on the spot, looking over the whole thing. Systems and procedures and what-ifs and what-abouts abounded. Generally, I took the word of someone standing right there over someone on a forum bloviating about the One True And Right Way. From these volunteers came ideas like how to approach some sorting, methods to mark off completion, potential organizations that might be interested, and so on.

But one volunteer had, by far, the most immediate major influence.

Floating in the back of our minds was how we were going to get all these boxes over to the storage. Even with a mere mile distance, it would be a soul-killing convoy of cars and trucks putting items into the storage units. It could have gone into Thursday. Thoughts of grabbing day laborers were floated, along with who knew what friend who could bring “a truck”.

But this volunteer suggested we hire movers, and also suggested who he had heard were great local movers. They ended up being Budget Movers of Westminster. A quote and a price later, and there they were at 9am the next morning. The next morning.

Like it often is with professionals, they didn’t whine, grate, or sniff when faced with a room of boxes – they just got to it.

Having wrangled volunteers for three days at that point, it was great to just have the ability to hire a firm to get the last tedious and dangerously physical portion done. “Please take this mass of boxes and get them to this other box.” was worth paying the money for, money which people all over the world sent me.

I rush to say that we definitely did have a couple other trucks and cars in the mix – we did four major loads of boxes from the warehouse to the units, and along the way, four car/truckloads of boxes went through volunteers, just to get that last little bit into the units before it got to be too dark.

At the end, we had all the boxes into the units (with some space left over), and for various values, the manuals and materials were “safe”.

When we were done with the storage, we went back through the warehouse, cleaning up some messes, tidying the place, and giving the shelves one last review.

One volunteer didn’t want to go. He kept sorting, kept going through, kept finding what he thought was one last unique manual. He went from shelf to shelf, just checking, just wanting to be 100% sure we’re captured one unique copy of every single manual in there. He’d gotten a ride from a friend up from Virginia, and then just stayed. He did not have a clear plan for how to get back, but figured it would work out, just like I’d written a post on here the previous Friday, in what was just a little less than a week ago, announcing this impossible task.

But he just wouldn’t let it finish.

We ended up shutting the lights off on him.

There’s a lot left to write, and I’ll get that going immediately in a post-mortem, along with ideas for the future. But at this moment. I am totally at peace with how things have gone. I’m in the manual world now, and I love the people it has brought into my life.

More coming soon. Thank you, everyone.

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In Realtime: Day 2 Felt Like Week 4 — August 19, 2015

This time, I’m sitting in my car, & I don’t feel broken, simply renewed.

It’s ten o’clock, and we probably have a couple more hours to go. What we are trying to do is ensure that everything is in a box that is going out. Then, tomorrow can consist of two things: moving items to the storage units, and quality wrap-up.

Last moment, we had to go out and buy even more boxes. There are 1,500 boxes in the collection now. I probably would have started making hard choices, but so many people have donated time and money to making this a reality, I didn’t want to let people down. As a result, we have erred slightly in favor of taking stuff then leaving stuff, and the 1500 boxes probably contain some amount of dupes.

Individuals have come running from all directions. Some drove hours to get here, some are families whose parents wanted to help and the kids ended up helping too.

Naturally, the wider exposure about this operation has led to a raft of expert opinions, wrapped in a tiny little bow and perfectly executed like a Metropolitan Opera premiere. I am sure this could have been done a hundred different ways, some with pros and cons. We worked with what we have. On Friday at noon, I had no idea that we only would have till Wednesday to get things out. We went for banker boxes, volunteer labor, and ultimately professional movers to move things to storage units that were a mile away.

I have been more willing to listen to suggestions given to me by sweaty, overworked volunteers who drove in and walked through the alleys with me to give advice and pointers from learned experience. One suggested a way to sort boxes quicker. Another one called out to his friends and family and they came running, while yet another point it out the bankers boxes could be bought at a nearby wholesale club without any red tape or waiting.

By the end of tomorrow, volunteers willing and depending on what other factors we haven’t figured it out, there will be multiple storage units a mile away that have these boxes. I will do a further breakdown and analysis of the whole thing, and as many thank you’s as I can possibly track down, but for now, I have to go back into the building. There’s work to be done and no amount of blogging is going to make it go away.

For those who have made it to the end:

If you are in the area and can come by tomorrow, your help can be used. The owner has let me know that if people come on site, they can take as many manuals as they want. Otherwise, they are all absolutely going into a dumpster.

I don’t think Wednesday is going to be as difficult, but you never know. So if you have time during the day or afternoon, it would be very, very, welcome.

I won’t be forgetting any of this anytime soon.

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