“Scan things. As much as possible. Mostly ephemera.”

It is worth scanning things.

It is also a foundation, one can hope – a foundation of existence and reliability for an item to be expanded upon. It can be contextualized, parodied, referenced. It stands as some level of proof of an idea, and it holds itself in the center of more in-depth historical research and tales. The nature of digital creation is not one of preservation in the sense of an exacting clone of a once-offline object – it’s to create a new object imbued with the advantages of the digital world and the memories of what it once was.

  • If you’ve scanned something nobody has before, you win.
  • If you scan something somebody has before, but better, you win.
  • If you scan something as well as somebody before but add metadata, you win.
  • If your scanned, metadata-laden collection of something is browsable/downloadable, you win.

Scanning: Some Thoughts, Jason Scott, October 3, 2013