Take your collection of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, comic strips, photos, sound clips, music, Web pages that you just know won't last long, and anything else you might find nifty that exists on paper. Digitize it. Scan it. OCR it. Whatever you can do to put it on a disk.
Use a webpage editor to make Web pages of all this stuff. Link it all together with webpage-style menus that make it reasonably easy to find stuff later on. Add your own personal froufrou, then save the whole mess in one place. Use a web browser to view it, and Voila! You have created your very own Portable Information Archive.
I came up with the idea after seeing an magazine CD in which the content
was arranged as a series of webpages which you navigated with an old copy
of Internet Explorer installed on the disk. This seemed like the ideal solution
the the growing mountain of stuff I was accumulating, from extra-funny comic
strips to hints and tips I might be able to use in the future (such as a
means of getting Windows 3.1 to read long filenames). It ceartainly was a
better solution than the method I was using previously--creating word-processing
documents with Microsoft Word. The webpage solution was much better
because:
--No matter how much Microsoft mutates Word, causing incompatibilities with
previous versions, you'll always be able to read your archive.
--Using HTML means any computer capable of running a web browser (even
if it isn't a Pentium running Windows 95 or higher) can be used to access
your archive, (provided, of course you saved it to a disk that computer can
read). This could be useful if for some reason your computers become inoperative
and you absolutely, positivley need something you've stored in such
an archive.
With that having been said, you yourself might be thinking such a thing would be nifty. If so, let me offer some advice based on experience:
This is really important, because without a well-planned menu system, you'll have trouble locating info that you've stored away long ago and seldom accessed. Try to think up every possible subject under which there'd be info that you'd find useful and want to store for future reference. Don't worry if you have nothing to put there yet. If you can think of it, chances are you'll eventually have something to put there. Then gather all these subjects into categories like this example:
--Computer game reviews, computer software, software news, and software hints/tips/cheats could be gathered under "Computer Software"
--The same subjects applied to hardware could become "Computer Hardware"
--These two computer-related subjects can be grouped together under "Computers"
--If you have a video game console, there will doubtless be useful info mirroring the computer stuff. Gather this under "Game Consoles". If you have more than one console you'd keep info on, divide this further by "(console name)". You might, for example have a Playstation and Saturn system, in which case instead of just "Consoles", you'd have Playstation Game Console and Saturn game Console.
--Audio and Video would have their own sections on the same level with Computers and Game Consoles.
--And all of the above can be gathered under the general term "Electronics"
Everything else you could be interested in can be broken down into categories like these, so in the future you can burrow down to a category that's likely to have the info you're looking for.
While your menus will be arranged by category, the content you place in these categories should be stored according to it's source. List all the possible sources for your content. Magazine names, Newspaper names, Newsletters, etc. Give each one a directory/folder. Then store your stuff according to where you got it. I have seperate folders for the NY Daily News, New York Post, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and other sources. That any one source can produce material in a variety of categories is irrelevant. What this will do is allow you to name the individual files according to the date the source material was published, which can aid in locating outdated stuff.
Within each source, I name the files according to the month, year, and page. "1298-102.htm" would indicate that this file contains an article that appeared in the December, 1998 issue on page 102.
A daily newspaper would add the day, like so: "122698-102.htm". The folder it was stored under would tell you the paper it came from, if you named it properly.
Image files for each article would be stored in the directory with the related files. No date/issue/page info should be necessary. If you need to find their filenames, you can always bring up the article first, then right-click the appropriate image to get it's location. Since this is an archive, and the original pictures are presumably going to be discarded, try to get a good scan. File size isn't important since this isn't going on the Web. You wouldn't want your only copy of a long lost image to be a shrunken-down, compression-artifact riddled, shadow of it's former self, would you?
I, for reasons listed below, prefer not to use long filenames. Using the old 8.3 DOS naming convention means I need to add two more layers of directories to seperate newspaper items that fall on the same day within different months/years--one folder for each year, and within each year, a folder for each month. It's really not that complicated if you build it out one branch at a time. By the same token, each magazine folder would contain seperate sub-folders for each year that you have material for.
This should be obvious from the name. Initially I called it the "personal information archive", but being a guy, that word "personal" just didn't feel right, so being that the intended purpose was to make the archive portable, well, you can figure out the rest. My archive currently resides on a Zip disk, and the plan is when it grows too large for that, it gets placed on a Jaz disk or a CD-RW. When the archive has accumulated 650 megabyes or so of data, I plan to burn it to a CD-R and begin the process anew.
You might even want to copy an old web browser to the disk as well, so it remains accessible even on PC's without web browsers. (yeah, I know...where am I gonna find one of those, huh?) The point of this is to insure the archive remains readable, even if you're faced with the worst-case scenario of needing to access some info stored there (hey, you might have important personal info stored there--you are the only one who looks at it, right?) and the only available PC is a dinosaur that happens to pre-date Windows 95 (which Microsoft plans to quit supporting by the end of 2001, just so you know). Maybe you don't think you'll ever face a situation like this. I'm not. I'm certainly not going to load up my archive with so much cutting-edge window-dressing so it can't be read on anything but a cutting-edge Windows box. Should you want to insure maximum compatibility:
--Try to avoid long filenames on actual articles: They just use up extra directory space for the excess characters. Anyway, the menu system you set up (you did set one up, right?) should make it unnecessary to root through filenames looking for a particular item.
--When burning to CD, don't use "Packet Writing". Packet writing is a newfangled method of getting files onto a CD or CD-RW, via a Microsoft add-on called DirectCD. It's convenient because you can simply drag files to the CD and drop them, as if it were another disk, without firing up a CD-authoring application. The bad part is that the resulting disk can only be read by Win32 systems.(Okay, this may not be a bad thing for you, but I'm not looking to burn any bridges behind me)
--No matter how you write them, CD-RW disks, in my opinion, are just as potentially problematic (so far as your archive goes) as packet-writing CD-Rs, as older CD-ROM drives (those not meeting the "Multi-Read" spec) may not be capable of reading CD-RW. If anything, use a CD-RW to temporarily hold the archive as you update it before re-burning it to another CD-R . When creating the archive for the first time, just collect enough files to make an all-at once burn practical. That way any computer capable of reading a CD-R can read your archive.
--If you're having trouble collecting 650MB of stuff, and you're distressed by leaving all that remaining space permanently unused, there are 3" CD-R disks that hold 80MB. Or "business card" CD-Rs that hold 30MB. They're a bit more expensive than ordinary 650MB CD-Rs (about a buck apiece as of this writing), so it's cheaper to just get over it and ignore the "wasted space" since CD-R disks are going for less than 10 cents apiece nowadays. Attempting to use the leftover space by creating a multi-session disk can backfire in a worst-case scenario, since there are still old PCs whose CDROM drive can't read multi-session disks. Trust me, they're out there. You may expect never to see such machines, but I myself won't count on it.
This should go without saying. Your archive is for your personal use, and probably contains stuff that shouldn't be on the WWW. Personal info, MP3's, copyrighted written material, trademarked images, etc. Keep it to yourself and you won't get static from anybody.
I make it a practice to keep data files off the main hard drive. Long before I dreamed up this idea of building data archives, I only placed applications and other stuff than can be easily replaced on my computer's internal hard drive. In the event of a failure, you don't want irreplacable info, archive or not, on that HD. I had this happen. On the morning of New Year's Day 1999, after idling all night, the HD in my 486 laptop (at the time, my primary computer) failed when I attempted to turn the machine off, dying in a chorus of clunking, grinding and scraping noises. Fortunatley I had long ago moved data files (pictures and documents) to floppies and zip disks, and applications to a Jaz drive/disk. I lost nothing. I simply plugged the Jaz cartridge into a Jaz drive on my desktop PC and picked up where I left off. The archive, such that it was at the time, was safe on the Zip disk it was created on.
--When updating your archive, identity the files that need to be updated, and the directories/folders where new files are going. Copy those files to removable media or the hard drive, make your modifications and save them. Now, copy the entire archive to your hard drive (somewhere other than where your updates are stored, else you might wipe out your changes), and overwrite the outdated files with the newly updated ones you've created. Add any additional files, and re-burn to a new CD-R. As for the old archive, don't toss it, file it somewhere safe. If you should lose or ruin the updated archive, you'll still have everything up to the last update and stand a better chance of reassembling the sources that made up the update you lost.
updated 6/10/2001
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