archiving publications digitally
 

How much if our Hobby History is available on either microfilm or in a digital format?

I was thinking weather or not it would be feasible if there was something like newspapers.com for hobby publications for researchers and collectors?

I would like to know this as well.
It would be awesome if you could visit a website and browse through thousands of old issues of SCD, Baseball Cards Magazine, Old Cardboard, etc. It would really help me with my research.

The catch is that most of it is still under copyright. (Maybe all? I don't know of any pre 1923 hobby publications)

I'm not sure how newspapers .com does things, but they probably had permission from the newspapers in return for some small amount from the paywall fees.

This would be a good project for an collectors organization. The national stamp group I'm in has gotten the rights to many classic books that have very little commercial value, but are the best references despite being in some cases more than 50 years old. Most of those are online free to members, and in some cases for everyone. (Being a member I'm not sure exactly which are which.)

If someone could get the rights, and a good run of physical copies it wouldn't be hard. Scans are just time consuming.

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...uptcy-auction/

Sports Collectors Digest was one of a group of 50 magazines sold in a bankruptcy auction last month. Publisher F+W Media filed for Chapter 11 earlier this year and the company’s assets, including magazine titles from various hobby and collectible realms, went on the block.

The buyer for SCD and five other collectible-oriented publications was Cruz Bay Publishing, a division of Active Interest Media based in Boulder, CO. The cost for all of them according to FolioMag.com was a modest $350,000. Cruz Bay won 14 publications in all including Popular Woodworking for $1 million and Writer’s Digest for $200,000.

So it looks like we'd have to get permission from Active Interest Media.

I bet if you offer to do all the scanning work and allow them to paywall it, they might just let it happen.

While I really dislike paywalls on newspapers - like really, what commercial value is there in most newspapers older than a few days?
I do have the stamp membership, which is something like 15 or 20 dollars a year. Their magazine is quarterly and it's really worth the subscription fee.

So I pay for newspapers.com, and I have no problem with that since the money I give them goes to upkeep of the site and finding and digitizing new papers.

I don't think I'd have an issue with paying for hobby information as well. We could always ask, and some journals from the 40's through the 70's such as Burdick's Card Collectors Bulletin and American Card Catalog probably didn't get their copyrights renewed if they had them at all -they might actually be in the public domain?

I think the more you as a collector can learn, the better off you'll be. I don't mince words when I say that I got a real crappy education, but card collecting and net54 has really helped reverse that. I thought maybe this idea would help other collectors too particularly since there are swaths of missing hobby history. Guys like Lionel Carter is one of the biggest reasons why I'm a writer today.

Massive project. Lots of effort. Small payoff. That SOUNDS like a hobby...I’m in! :D

In all seriousness...does sound like an interesting idea. OCR software is getting better and better, which would give the archive searchability.

I know the rights would be tricky, but be cool to get all the old Beckett monthly’s in there too!

There are quite a few collectors, me included, who study the history of the hobby. David Karthman (hey David) is the king of hobby history on this forum. .FWIW, digitizing everything would be a monumental project. Here are a few links to some hobby letters from early on..

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=207878&page=3

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=1528717

.

I probably would too, if I needed it often enough. I just don't do many searches that turn up there.
They don't have much overlap between the archive the LOC has, which is free.
And they don't have the NYT which has its own archive. They are mostly paywall, but some brief articles that don't have any connection to any important history are free.

I really do think it's a worthwhile project. I just want people to go into it eyes open as to legalities, costs and how much effort it would take.
I have a scanner that can handle outsize items like the SCD magazines, but it's pretty slow and some of them are something like 200+ pages.

You can check out Internet Archive if any of their projects apply:
https://archive.org/projects/

I'm not certain about copyright status. There are many books and magazines that get uploaded into there that are still "active" in copyright status... however, Preservation typically will have more leniency in copyright law (depends on the country of course) as preservation is not usually seen as being competition against the copyright holder.

I think there's a process where a rights holder can make something available in some format without losing the rights. Like if you want to put a book online that never sold well, the author may allow it, but if you want for some reason to publish a hardcopy for sale they still retain the rights.

One of my stamp catalogs did that. Really good detailed book about a very niche area. The original hardcopy was $100, and the author essentially made nearly nothing or lost money. He also would send a free update once a year.
Until he made a deal with Google books. Now it's online for free and gets updated whenever he gets to doing an update. Overall that's not such a bad thing. It's in wikibooks now, I'm not sure if it's an extension of google books or a different service.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Intern..._Stamp_Catalog

It is probably a good idea for defunct publications with no modern reprints and things that were self-published by long-dead hobbyists, like the self-published guide to the Burdick Collection. Assuming they were ever copyrighted and that the copyrights were renewed they might still fall under fair use. Check out the fair use doctrine:

https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/copyrightinfo/fairuse.html

I have almost all hobby publications from the 1930s up to the early 1990s, and many from the 1990s (mainly SCD and Beckett). Until about 1970, the vast majority of them were done on a typewriter and reproduced by either mimeograph or spirit duplication (dittoes), and they were typically a one-person, or sometimes two-person, operation. Some of the editors/publishers are still around (like Steve Mitchell of this board).

If anybody wants to look up something specific, I can try to find it. Otherwise, I've written many hobby history posts here on Net54 that make use of my publication collection and include scans from them. I compiled links to many of those posts here:

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=253510

I think all we'd be trying to do is preserve our history for future generations. If this could get started now -even a small portion, it could really benefit researchers and collectors. A project like this isnt something done in a day or even in a year, but it's more along the lines of watching a tree grow. If it were me, I would start out with publications that are small and that I know arent copy-written like the 1939 ACC or Card Collector's Bulletin first.

David Kathman has really done an outstanding job with a lot of our hobby history already, so hat tip to you David!