I’ll just attribute this question to the spring cleaning reflex.
I spent the past two days scanning an old blue binder’s worth of snapshots dating back to the period around 1987-1988. I can pretty confidently assign the dates based on the photos of our cats, including our first pair of calicos, Miki and Kua. We adopted Miki on Christmas 1986, and Kua in July 1987, while living in a townhouse project near Kahala Mall. And by May 1988, we had bought a house in Kaaawa and were in the process of moving. Photos of Kua as a kitten, and as a young cat, were scattered through this album, making the dating a relatively easy task. These photos all fell in that window of time, between mid-1987 and mid-1988.
And while pulling out the photo albums, I looked through other boxes containing miscellaneous files.
I’ve got boxes and boxes of old file folders containing notes, correspondence, documents, and newspaper clippings about a variety of topics. Back before the internet and readily available news databases, if you wanted to follow an issue, you clipped and filed news stories. Or you went to the library and worked your way through newspaper microfilms. I spotted a couple of thick folders of Kahoolawe-related clippings from 1976-1980, but there are many others. Underscore the “many.”
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and most of the 1990s as well, this was the way it was done. Read, clip, and file. And if I misplaced a file and needed to recreate that history, about the only recourse would be to go through those newspaper microfilms and their printed indexes to essential recreate the clipping file.
Today, of course, it’s quite different. Those clipping files are not an indispensable resource. An account with Newspapers.com now makes it simple to find news stories about a topic within a specified range of dates.
So here’s my problem. I would like to scan these old files, organize the scans, and dump the original paper copies. With written notes, letters, or documents, that’s easy. With newspaper clippings, not so much. It’s hard to feed them through the scanner I’m using, and they are often oddly shaped to fit into empty blocks on a newspaper page, or continued from one page to another. Scanning isn’t impossible, but with lots of clipping it would be a miserable task.
But I’m reluctant to just get rid of the files, even though I know that these copies can easily be replaced via an online search. But the clipping files represent an already curated version of the news. I wouldn’t have simply clipped every story on a topic. I would read and judge whether it was worth the time to clip and save. And looking back, it seems to me that knowing what I though was valuable at that time is important. It tells me about the nature of my interest in the topic independent of any notes the file might contain.
So…just throw out the clipping files? Put them back into the boxes and into storage again? I’ve considered making notes of the stories–headline, publication, date–and then throwing them out. But, again, a time consuming task.
Any suggestions on how to approach such a project?
Then on Saturday, February 28, 1976, a day-long rally was held to protest the U.S. Army’s continued control and use of Makua Valley for military training. The rally was organized by the Hawaiian Coalition of Native Claims. The group’s director, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean, had been in the small group that had illegally landed on Kahoolawe the previous month in the first of many public protests against the Navy’s continued bombing of the island.
