Over the years (and decades for some of us), we have amassed large quantities of railroad and toy train photos, articles, forum downloads of tips and other items like magazines and books. Keeping it all tidy has become a real chore for me and I’d like to hear how you have managed.
Photos.
I’ve got thousands of photos and slides from the 60s and 70s and 80s of railroads all over the US, East Asia and Australia that are sitting in boxes and are probably deteriorating as we speak. My eventual goal (if ever I get around to it) will be to scan them in and put them on CDs.
But will CDs be around for 100 years? Already, jump drives and iPods are become more prevalent.
About the only photos I scanned in were some I took of the now abandoned FJ&G back in 70 and 71, that a fellow used for his web site:
http://www.fjgrr.org/railpage34.html
Today, I have a digital camera and I must take 30 toy train and real train photos on average a day. I’ve created computer folders that I store them in by month; arranging them in a numerical sequence coding that automatically sorts them, i.e.
0501
0502
0503 and so on, indicating Jan, Feb, Mar of 2005.
Text.
Magazines and books are on shelves and in boxes awaiting processing. NOTHING is thrown away. There are diagrams and documents that are becoming yellow and also should probably be scanned in someday and digitized.
BTW, if you ever download stuff from the internet in PDF format, you will notice that there are a lot of returns after each line. If you ever wi***o eliminate the returns, I’ve cracked the code on how to do it.
First, put another return between places you wi***o have paragraphs and sub-headlines.
Then, follow this sequence using the “search and replace” command. I assume you are using MS Word, but other programs have similar functions.
Go to “special” which gives you additional options in search and