It’s been a long holiday.
The thing about long holidays is that the seeds of ideas are always floating around, and if you sit around for too long without leaving the house, they take root in the moist skin around your ears and germinate into ideas seedlings. And sometimes the ideas grow into projects.
This particular idea was sown by Jamie, SproutNet supremo and recent newly-wed. Although I’m not going quite as far as he’d suggested, which was to create a full scale Paddy Concordance with index and search engine.
Well, not yet anyway. No, what I thought might be fun would be to create an online archive for press cuttings and articles, organized on a timeline.
Some experiments are taking place for the display format, and the results are excellent. But I need help finding cuttings and thought I’d put the word out.
What I’m looking for specifically is jpeg copies (or PDF) of cuttings relating to the band, however small these may be, so for example single reviews or short mentions are perfectly fine. I have quite a number of these, and I have some physical cuttings, but my scanning equipment is very rudimentary. So I really would be glad of help.
If there is a reasonable response, I intend to buy or borrow an A3 scanner for the big music paper interviews so we don’t need to worry about those (unless you have them in unbroken A3).
I also need details of the dates where known of the cuttings. In fact ideally, the file name should be something like “19850629 NME Review of Faron Young.jpg” which will help me sort everything onto the timeline (the date format is YYYYMMDD). They need to be reasonably ‘square’ (so not scanned at some strange angle) and scanned ‘flat” (i.e. not iPad or iPhone snaps), and to a reasonable resolution, I’d suggest 100DPI.
If you have something, including non-English sources, then contact first using the form below and we’ll work out a transfer method. I’m not so interested in website information (for example Guardian articles on the Guardian website) as much as actual scans of original newsprint.
And also if anyone wants to get creative and search for example in local libraries for concert reviews around the dates in the gigography, that’d be great too. I’ve enlisted the help of a researcher friend for one in Brighton already. Quite a number of concert reviews have already been discovered, and where I have these they’re already in the gigography, so do check there before going hunting.
If there are physical cuttings but no scanning equipment, let’s discuss what we can do with those too.