There's small heavy duty cardboard box near the desk I'm using at my parent's house filled with the notebooks and journals I've been keeping since the mid-nineties. The early ones are spiral notebooks from high school plus some fancy leather bound ones. Thankfully I've settled into the Moleskine family of notebooks, specifically the black soft cover pocket-size with squared/grid pages and a solid pen.
I'd love to say I'm writing the next great American novel, but mostly it's me hashing out the moody hot-mess of my self-centeredness knowing no one else will likely ever read it. Surely there's some gold in them there hills, but there'll be mountains of incredibly selfish, petty, and self-destructive nonsense to sift through not to mention terrible, terrible writing.
Seeing as how I'm not "working" like I was during the before time and how incredibly easy it is to go through a full day of our new normal without actually accomplishing anything, the mindless task of scanning, flipping to the next page, and organizing the new digital versions of my journals has kept me from the slow spiral into darkness – at least this past week.
It feels incredibly defeating having so little control of our current lives. Anything I can do to fight back is welcomed.
In so many aspects the idea of setting goals has been taken away during this pandemic. Some of the major goals we'd set, invested in, and attained in recent years have been taken out at the knees. The goals I'd set for 2020 have mostly been sloughed away as we've had to reassess our situation. Thank goodness for little victories each day simply keeping us buoyed.
Are the two house fires alive, fed, and clean before bed? Yes.
Are Saint Anne the Wife and I still married and friends? Yes.
Am I still journaling most days and maintaining a weekly blog post? Yes.
So back to this digital archiving of my notebooks. I've been meaning to do high-resolution scans of my journals for years but never got around to it. What I'm doing with my nonsense – at least this round – is based on some Google searches, specifically advice from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and the National Archives:
- Master Files - color scans at 600 dpi and saving the files in an uncompressed TIFF format.
- Access Images - smaller versions of those Master Files I'll put together a PDF by journal.
- Organization - Not sure it's the best means of organizing, but I'm setting up file folder by year_month/quarter (2020_01), the individual scans by year_month/quarter_page (2020_01_001).
I'd Googled something like "digitizing best practices" and "standards for digitizing paper journals" to somewhat prepare for future use. There's a ton of other options that I'm sure I'll attempt in time, but for now I'm trudging through 25+ years of journal entries and trying to not read each page and gag as I scan it in.