Information at Home

Musings on the digital world

northgardner — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:21:20 +0000

What would I have done in a pre-digital world? It seems like I would have amassed many more cabinets full of files, but my apartment would be no bigger. My mother can afford to be a pack rat because she lives in a big house in the suburbs, but I would have had to let go of all but the most necessary files, which would still have taken up a lot of space. Maybe we would rent another storage space. All of which makes me wonder: why do I have so much paper? I guess moving around a lot creates some of it–if I had had one set of doctors for the past ten years, I wouldn’t have to keep copies of all my records. And of course the ease of getting credit has allowed me to have a bunch of credit cards, all of whose records I have kept. But a large portion of my files are from schoolwork. I have kept them so diligently, because I know I won’t remember what’s in them, and I imagine I could use them in future writing, teaching, or librarianship. I imagine I would have kept all of that stuff even if I had gone to graduate school in the 1950s rather than the 2000s. Scholars tend to have lots of books and papers. Perhaps all of this digitization really is a blessing for scholars like me, in that it allows us to live without the mounds of papers we once would have had.

Keeping the discs

northgardner — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:45:49 +0000

I don’t know if it’ll save me much space, but I’m replacing the binders I’ve used for years with paper sleeves and plain black boxes. Here’s what I got:

Even though I’m digitizing all of my music, I still want to keep the discs–the issue of the booklets aside, what if I need full-quality sound files at some point in the future? What if I the mp3s I’m making somehow become obsolete? I guess I could sell the ones I’m not too attached to… But that’s too much work right now. The problem with the binders was that it was impossible to keep an organization schema, because all of the CDs (and their booklets) were stuck in groups of four and moving them required a lot of work. So I got these boxes, in which I can file the CDs and their booklets, find them easily, and insert new ones when I have to. I always tried to organize the binders chronologically within classical and non-classical divisions. Which was nice for browsing–it meant that Bach was next to Handel and not Berg, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was next to Jimi Hendrix’ Are You Experienced? and not Prince’s Sign o’ the Times. But now that I’m mostly using iTunes to play music, I don’t need to browse the physical CDs anyway, and plain old alphabetical by artist (or composer) will be much easier to navigate. I do worry about the CDs deteriorating; by the time mp3s are obsolete, the discs might not play any more anyway.

Digitizing sound

northgardner — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:38:53 +0000

In addition to digitizing the contents on my file cabinets, I’d really like to digitize all of my records, CDs, and tapes. I know that sounds backwards–computer-based music software has made converting CDs to digital sound files easy and productive; many people have already digitized (and disposed of) their entire music collection. But I have never really had the time to do this in the way that I would want. If I am going to digitize my CDs, I’m want to have as much metadata on the tracks as I can, and I want that metadata to be accurate. So whenever I “import” a CD into iTunes, I always add certain information from the CD booklet: the release dates of the recordings, the performers’ names, and the label names and numbers for the CD (and for the original recording, if it was not on CD). Other information such as composers’ names and dates of recording are nice, but not really worth the time it takes to key them in. I’d love to have the CD booklet scanned in, and I may try that too, but iTunes does not have a I still want several access points to each mp3. Of course, digitizing the records and tapes is a whole other story. Somehow I don’t think that will ever really get done. I’ll do an LP here and there, but it’s not really worth my time.

Digital file organization

northgardner — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:05:04 +0000

I’ve been organizing the documents on my hard drive by academic year for the past ten years or so. In my documents folder, I have folders called 0102 (for the 2001-2002 academic year), 0203, etc. This is handy because stray files that didn’t warrant a sub-folder are relatively easy to find. But there are two problems with this system: First, it was never clear where to put files from the summer; and second, as I’ve digitized more and more of my paper files, I’ve often wanted all documents of a kind in one place. The first issue is easily remedied–by rearranging the files by calendar year, but the second is a bit tougher. I suppose that ideally, I’d use tags on all the documents so that they’d be viewable by more than one characteristic/access point. That would have to be automated somehow…

Neat

northgardner — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:22:11 +0000

So last weekend we went to a wedding in Chicago, and on the way I got lots of inspiration for blog posts just by flipping through SkyMall magazine. Pages 206 and 207 of the Holiday 2009 edition of Skymall contain an ad for the projects of the Neat Company, which sells scanners and digital filing systems (together) for papers, receipts, and business cards. The products are called NeatReceipts and NeatDesk, the former including a portable scanner, and the latter a desktop scanner. A nice idea, especially for people who get lots of business cards and important receipts, as it seems like the OCR is quite good on cards with colored backgrounds. I don’t think I’d want to use the filing system part of it–I’m fine organizing my scans on the finder and using Spotlight to search them, but it’s good to think about what functionality software might lend to my scanning process.

Receipts

northgardner — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:08:18 +0000

Yesterday’s New York Times Idea of the Day pointed to an August article from thebigmoney.com about whether we (as a society) could do away with paper receipts. It’s odd to have to carry little pieces of paper around with us in this digital age, observes the author Chadwick Matlin. I agree wholeheartedly, although not everyone inhabits as world a fully digitized as he and I clearly do. Still, for me, receipts have always been one of the hardest things to keep in order. I tend to keep them in my wallet for a while, and then stuff them into an envelope, and mark the envelope with a vague idea of when the receipts are from, so that I might be able to find one if I need to. Scanning receipts seems way too much trouble, and so I am stuck. I’ve even taken to using more cash on smaller purchases, so that I won’t feel like I have to keep the receipt.

Notebooks/Textbooks

northgardner — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:37:08 +0000

Somewhere beneath all of the piles of papers in my apartment (or perhaps somewhere in my mother’s house) I have a notebook from an English history course my grandfather took at a private school while he was is high school here in New York. The handwriting is quite nice (as was the usual in the mid-1910s), and the small-ish book is crammed with notes. I thought of this book because in another course I am taking this semester, the topic of textbook prices has come up a number of times. In my grandfather’s time, for people like him, buying a book for a course like this was far too expensive. The thing you studied from, and the thing you kept and referred back to was your notebook. I’m not saying we should ditch textbooks altogether (although in many cases we probably should), but this is just something to think about.

Notebooks

northgardner — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:20:49 +0000

Ugh. So, up to the 9th grade or so, I used to use those multi-subject notebooks which had dividers between sections–one section would be math, one English, etc. In high school I started to use separate spiral-bound notebooks, because I realized that different courses required vastly different amounts of note-taking, and I had ended up with lots of blank pages in the multi-subject ones. Through high school and college, I tried to use re-use single-subject notebooks for similar courses, so as not to keep the notebooks somewhat organized without wasting too much paper. When I moved to Los Angeles for grad school, I quickly realized how much space all of those spiral-bound notebooks took up, and switched to taking notes on legal pads, tearing out the pages and putting them in hanging folders in a file cabinet. I didn’t have to keep blank pages any more, and also, I could keep notes, course syllabi, photocopied articles, and handouts all in the same place. Well now we don’t have space for all the file cabinets required for that system, and I really want to go digital anyway (more on that in a future post). So now that I’m once again back in school, as much as possible I take notes in the cloud on google docs. I don’t need to digitize my notes from high school, but a major part of my home-digitization project is digitize notes (and other paper stuff) from grad school. This is probably the largest part of the project, and I haven’t even started. I’m still digitizing medical records, tax records, and other mundane things.

Traveling

northgardner — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:36:36 +0000

Packing for a trip always seems to take longer than it should. Traveling with a baby requires even more packing time of course. And I have often wished that I could have an all-purpose, readily packed bag that I could just grab on my way out the door for a trip. But unless you’re making lots of trips of similar length to the same place for the same purpose, that just doesn’t work. This past weekend, we went to Boston (by car) for a wedding. We needed to pack formal-ish outfits for the wedding and all of its attendant events, and the weather was right on the cusp of being wintery, so we packed lots of layers for all three of us. I suppose having packing lists helps, but especially with a baby, that list will change drastically from month to month and year to year. Maybe I can figure out some kind of automated list that will change depending on the weather, type and length of trip, and mode of travel. Any ideas?

Information organization at home

northgardner — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:22:39 +0000

I’ve been trying to digitize the contents of my filing cabinets for about a year now. The biggest obstacle has been time–even with a relatively fast document scanner and good scanning software, it all just takes so long! #1 among unforeseen challenges has been adapting the grouping of papers from hanging files to digital file folders. Hanging files can hold hundreds of items and keep them in a rough order. But scanning a hundred pages is not usually a good idea: it’s harder for the hardware and software to handle, and makes individual items hard to find. So I’ve had to break down hanging files in smaller chunks, which involves creating a new schema for each folder. If it were just about feeding the paper into the machine, this would be easy!