What to do with those old aviation magazines...

[Noha307]

Ever wonder what to do with that large collection of aviation magazines you've built up over the years and can no longer keep? Send 'em to the Internet Archive! Just fill out the form on their donation page, and someone will contact you. The Internet Archive will eventually scan digitize the magazines and make them available online. As long as the magazines are donated, the digitization occurs at no cost to you and they will even reimburse you for the cost of the shipping. After scanning, the Internet Archive will store the magazines at their physical archive. I recently enabled the donation of two collections (one of which already has a donation item) and both donors I worked with said after the fact that the people at the Internet Archive were great to work with and their responses were very prompt.

Some of the aviation magazines partially available on the Internet Archive include Aero Digest, Aviation Week, and Flight International. These donations ensure that the valuable information they contain will preserved for future generations and available to researchers. For example, just the other day I grabbed some screenshots of a few aircraft manufacturer logos and added them to those company's Wikipedia articles since they had lacked them. Also, along with Hathi Trust, their digitized books have been invaluable for threads like the one about vintage aviation books and periodicals.

For those wondering about copyright, the Internet Archive operates under the theory of controlled digital lending. The justification is that libraries are allowed to have and lend out copies of books and CDL is just the digital version of that. Therefore, the key points are that anyone engaging in CDL must: hold a physical copy of the publication, remove that copy from physical circulation whenever a digital copy is made available, and not loan out more physical copies than they hold. Check out the link above if you want to learn more.

Finally, I will point out that the Internet Archive accepts more than just magazines. I just chose to focus on magazines because: a) I run into the problem of what to do with old aviation magazines a lot here at the museum and b) they are much more ephemeral and less likely to be preserved than books.

[Vagabond]

Thank for the info!! That is a valuable resource to be aware of!!

I just did a similar donation with a collection of sheet music I had to a popular music archive in update NY.

What a great way to preserve resources for future generations.

Cheers!!

[mastaphixa]

I just visited the web site via the provided link. Perhaps I misunderstood but it stated they were not accepting magazines. I have many years of Wings and Airpower magazines that I would love to make available to future aviation enthusiasts. They were a fantastic resource for me and I would love to share them.

[Noha307]

I just visited the web site via the provided link. Perhaps I misunderstood but it stated they were not accepting magazines.

I see what you're talking about:

(We are not collecting some things yet such as loose magazines, mainstream dvd's or vhs tapes.)

I never noticed that before. (Or more correctly, I remember reading that sentence and the note about the DVDs/VHSs, but I must have missed the note about the magazines.) They were very happy to accept the magazines that my contact had. The page hasn't been updated in two months and I initially contacted them just under two months ago, so I doubt anything has changed. They also still have a check box on the actual donation form for serials. They also have a collection of over 200,000 magazines that have already been digitized, so even though many of those have been uploaded by other users, they are still very interested in them.

My guess is that the operative word in that statement is loose. They're probably just trying to avoid people sending in one or two magazines and not whole collections. They were very responsive when I emailed them, so I would suggest just filling out the form and when they respond you can ask about it.

[airnutz]

Thanks Noha for the link, especially for the Flight International archive. Flight used to have a complete archive back to 1909 until a coupla' years ago until they reconfigured their website which may have had something to do with being bought up by some publishing conglomerate. Their new rendition hasn't brought back the archive.

Your Flight International link appears to be somewhat incomplete starting with 1934, but if I go to archive.org and enter Flight International in the search box it offers dates from 2021-previous to 1909. After that things can get sketchy. For instance, if you pick 2017 for the archive you want to view you may not get anything from Flight from 2017, but you will get a bunch of NASA papers etc. I assume at this point they have a work in progress and a few bugs...or I'm screwing up.

Regardless, there is some very useful stuff in the older archives and I'll have to be pragmatic when I go looking for something specific. It's better than what's available now from the parent publisher. I really lament the loss of the original Flight International/Flight Journal archive it was a wonderful complete collection with a superb search feature.

[Noha307]

Perhaps I misunderstood but it stated they were not accepting magazines.

I just today attended an webinar on physical donations that the Internet Archive held and specifically asked about it. The reason for the "loose magazines" wording is that they would prefer to have a complete run rather than just a few loose copies. From the way you describe it, I think your collection would fit the bill.

However, I want to emphasize the word prefer because in other parts of the presentation they stated how willing they were to accept a very broad range of materials. (Someone else asked what they definitely wouldn't accept and one of the presenters actually said she couldn't think of anything.) So don't let it deter you. If you're not sure, shoot 'em an email and ask.

EDIT (21-05-28): The recording of the webinar has been uploaded and is now available here: Physical Donations at the Internet Archive. The questions mentioned above were answered at 38:46 and 42:21 in the recording.