De-cluttering my various libraries

A large amount of de-cluttering took place over the recent holiday period. The most recent phase was that of sorting through my book, audio, and video libraries.

Many shelves of paperbacks were recycled, as were old magazines. While reflecting on the magazine situation, and accepting of the fact that while I flicked through every page of every magazine that I received I didn’t read very much of them, I also accepted that even though I stored them on shelves I didn’t revisit them. With that in mind I resolved to not renew subscriptions to all but one magazine during the next 12 months. My book shelves look quite sparse now (and wonderful).

Given that we don’t have a video-tape player any longer, the small pile of video tapes can be placed in the landfill pile (I don’t think there’s any second-hand value in VHS tapes these days).

My old collection of around 120 LPs was, without any sign of emotional attachment from me, consigned to landfill. If I ever find that I want to listen again to some of the tracks that I at one time enjoyed, I’ll visit the iTunes Store and purchase the track.

I’ve now done a first sort through the audio CD collection. My CD collection began in 1985, nearly 25 years ago. My taste in music, though still eclectic, has moved on from those days. I’ve not listened to many of those CDs for decades. So, accepting of that situation, I now have a pile of 170 CDs that will be relocated (thrown out, sold, or given away). The pile of CDs that I’m considering copying to hard disk (ripping) numbers about 130. More than likely, I’ll further reduce that number. After ripping, the physical CDs will then be moved out.

On the subject of music, rather than CDs, my two sources of audio these last few years have been a) per-track purchases from beatport.com, and b) a premium subscription to Digitally Imported and SKY.fm which gives me access to over 60 24-hour per day music streams of a wide variety of genres.

Next, once the scanner I’ve ordered arrives, I’ll begin to digitise paper-based records and photographic negatives and slides. Once appropriate numbers of backup copies have been made, the originals will be destroyed.

Ever onwards …