Sunday 28 September 2008

Magazine archive?

I can't remember which forum it was on, but someone recently suggested that Wild Swan could make out-of-print issues of Model Railway Journal available as free PDF downloads. Now while it's a nice idea I'm not sure how likely it is at least in the near future - after all, Wild Swan don't even have an email address!

However, it has got me thinking. It really is about time that someone somewhere started making a digital archive of all the magazines out there, starting with the oldest issues. Obviously there are copyright issues involved which would need looking into with the respective copyright holders, and it's unlikely that publishers would agree to the most recent publications being made freely available, but how about back-issues from years ago? And what about titles like Model Railway Constructor that are no longer in circulation?

Quite often you'll read an article in the railway or modelling press that references an old issue of a long-out-of-print magazine. Not many people have the resources to amass large collections of back issues, but there is undoubtedly a huge archive of valuable information out there which, unless it is archived and made more readily available, will simply be forgotten.

1 comment:

  1. Certainly, Zinio.com is up to the task of digitizing and archiving past issues of Model Railway Journal.

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