A little side note on the occasion of these gaming magazine sets showing up. There's some drama happening in the scanning world because one of the sites has announced closure. Now, normally you might think it's some legal or financial or health/illness thing. Well, no.
The site, oldgamemags.com, is closing up because the admin is furious at his perception that I or others acting under my influence are mirroring "his" scans at the Internet Archive. I'm not and they're not under my influence, but let's set that factoid aside for a bit.
Scanning is very difficult work, especially if you want to do it right - usually you have to slice the magazines up, there's all sorts of quality checks that need to be done, and many of them do all sorts of touch-up to damage to the covers when they put them in.
As a result, the process, like all amateur digitization processes, leads to a pretty off-kilter set of personalities. You don't image things day in and day out, resulting in dense packs of bytes that you then have to upload, without having some intense aspects to your character.
This is all fine when it's focused on the quality, or tracking, tenaciously, a missing issue or very rare title. It's legions less quaint and enjoyable when it becomes a fulcrum point for attacks, infighting, and wars over extremely minor or odd details.
Nestled in here is the debate of whether an item you have scanned in, is "your" scan. I happen to think it makes it your labor, not your actual creation, but you might be surprised to hear that this position is not consistent within the hobby. From there, it gets dark.
Anyway, this site was a community of people who really cared about their items, with a variant set of opinions cobbled together from hopes and dreams about what they were doing and what it represented. And the owner of the site, having created a cartoon enemy, is killing it.
That's a real shame. It's petulant and silly. I didn't do what they're accusing me of, but that's irrelevant, because SOMEONE is, and the result is to shut down hundreds of people from communicating and discussing and sharing? Seems extremely short sighted.
But that's the breaks - materials will still be digitized, the excellent people who do this difficult effort will continue, and hopefully we'll enjoy a day where the least of anyone's worries is who "owns" a set of scans.
