Save everything. For culture!

• I've posted something about Bayesian postmodernism to LessWrong and they didn't promptly cough up their own skulls in horror. Critique welcomed.

I'm all about the digital archiving lately. A Rocknerd post, three articles on the Save Aussie Music wiki on digitising audio, image scanning and negative scanning, and a call to action on the SAM blog. My target here is to get bored suburbanites with collections from their youth and leverage their nostalgia.

The big problem at the moment is nowhere to put it (legally). I want to find a library (state reference library level if possible) who can accept deposits of people's home digitisations such that, at the very least, researchers can access them. Of course, with indie stuff, creators are often quite happy to let you put stuff up on a blog (and pleased and surprised anyone still cares). So if you have contacts at major libraries, that would be fantastically helpful.

I'm also looking for expertise in digital archival in general, and also anyone who's got experience digitising video tapes. Plain old DVD recorders do an adequate job — but if you've digitised video tapes to your PC, please tell me as much detail as possible about your software and hardware.

("Good enough" for VHS appears to be DVD-formatted MPEG2 at a high bitrate, which would indeed be way higher quality than any source material.)

I've certainly leveraged my own nostalgia — I bought a side table yesterday for ten quid just to put my turntable and cassette deck on and they're all hooked up and ready to roll. Now to find my Perth stuff ...