The beginning of a new year is a good time to decide whether you want to tackle pre-existing problems you’ve been ignoring, and putting together the Fleet collection finally broke the last straw in terms of my sketchbook situation. I’ve stopped scanning artwork predictably since stardancer.org went away, which means I no longer have documentation or easy access to art from 10+ years now, and if I keep waiting that situation will only get worse.

This is the year I’ve decided I’m going to fix that.

My goal is to catalog all my physical artwork. Not just the work in sketchbooks, but the various paintings and finished pieces in portfolios and binders. Cataloging in this case means the following:

• The piece is archived in a digital format appropriate for reproduction. This requires scanning, because I can’t photograph things well enough for the purpose.
• The piece is documented and tagged, so that it is searchable on my hard drive, and bringing up its meta-data will tell me where to find it on my bookshelves. (Or tell me if it’s in the hands of a collector, and which collector.)

In terms of numbered sketchbooks, I am on 133 in the large format, and AZ in the small (small sketchbooks are formatted A-Z, then AA, AB, AC, etc, to AZ, then I’ll start with BA, BB, BC, etc). I have at least twelve binders and six portfolios, and then there’s some loose material I have never organized in bins. This is not a small job… there’s a reason I’ve been too daunted to start it. But it needs to be done, so… I have begun it!

My first step was making the archived files a home, which I did on my external drive (the only one big enough), and copying all the existing scans from all the scattered parts of my computer into one place. I decided to make folders for each sketchbook because it would be easier to see at a glance which sketchbooks haven’t been touched at all, in terms of archiving. (Look at Sketchbook 2, for instance!)

Back in my Livejournal days I started a sketchbook retrospective, so I’m going to go through those posts next and see what I can suck out of them, meta-data-wise. Until I decide on a tagging/sorting program (a task I offloaded to someone much better at looking for software), I’d like to put meta-data about the sketches in a text file in each folder. I started writing similar lists in college, so I figure: recover those, add to them, continue on.

From this point, my plan is to scan at least five old pages a week, along with whatever new work I finish. On Fridays, probably. As a way to keep honest, I’m going to post some of them here and on Locals every couple of weeks. I might return to streaming my scanning process because that was fun… something to consider when I decide how to handle streaming in the future.

This is a big project: years of work, I’m thinking. But organizing it has already made me feel better, and looking at empty sketchbook folders has made me think ‘oh, let’s grab that book and do a few scans so that folder will have something in it!’ I feel that's an excellent start: rather than daunted, I feel interested. Creating an empty structure and slotting things into it is a lot more fun than staring at an empty anything and thinking 'what do I do.'

I want to say my lesson here is: “Start early when it comes to documenting and archiving your work.” But that isn’t the lesson, really, because I was documenting and archiving my work… I just chose the system poorly. When the website went away, it blew away years of work. What I need to take away from that experience is“document and archive your work in a multiply-redundant way, because systems and software and file formats change.” I can work with that.

Regardless, a good beginning. You will be kept informed.