Storing stuff takes space and effort. Cataloging even more so. Making it available to others is a jump in magnitude.

Eventually, it can become untenable.

Organizations like this tend to not lack donors. What they lack is the capacity to cope with donations. Time, labor, space, money are all finite, regardless of their mission.

Even the Salvation Army will refuse things like furniture. It’s not carte blanche. That said, I’ll donate even ratty clothing to the SA because I know they’re at the tail end of consumer product life, they inspect and sort all the incoming clothing, and their discards end up bundled for recycle or other purposes.

I donate to let them have first crack at it with their expertise rather than condemn it to a landfill directly. Give that old ‘92 Comdex t-shirt one last chance.

I don’t know anything in detail about VCF. I don’t know if the IEEE has archives of everything already.

I know there’s an effort to scan several hundred Computer Shopper magazines. I know there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of time setting up a system to scan a very large stack of DEC VAX microfiche.

I guess its a shame these magazines didn’t fall into the hands of someone with the zeal these other folks have for their projects.

I have also learned to not question the motives and projects of folks in the vintage computer scene. Not my time, not my project, who am I to judge.

It was with a bit of a heavy heart when my large collection of Dr. Dobbs magazines went into the recycling bin.

When I cleaned out my grandfather’s house, I came back with (among other things) several dozen Popular Mechanics magazines from the 40s. They were all 200+ pages. Talk about a snapshot of a different world. But after 10+ years sitting in a box in the garage, and a house move later, I kept three and the rest went into the blue bin.

Which brings me to my final point. If you have a collection, if you have any care about its disposition, you should do that yourself to other enthusiasts that may share your interests. Because your heirs, or the people task with cleaning up after your gone, will likely just put it in a large dumpster to be carted away.

But then, even if you do get it to others, it may well end up in landfill anyway.

By all means leave out a few things that have particular significance to you but, by and large, I've learned that less is generally more.

It depends on what kind of library we are talking about.

Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – they throw out books all the time. They have quite limited space, so they can't keep books which are no longer relevant to their target audience.

National libraries, research libraries of leading universities – many of them rarely or never throw books out. I remember, when I was a university student, finding IBM 1400 manuals sitting on the shelves in the stacks. They are probably still sitting there. I believe they turned their last 1400 off in the 1970s.

I remember borrowing a book, and according to the due date stamp inside its cover, the last person to borrow it before me, had done so 40 years prior. You could tell the books that hadn't been borrowed in a long time, because they still had punch cards in them, from back when the library had used punch cards to track book borrowing. If you actually borrowed such a book, they'd remove the punched card and discard it as part of the borrowing process. I bet if I went back today (20+ years later), there would still be books with punched cards in them.

The next museum or library will, I assume, be more careful.