Best way to collate/archive old journals?

March 24, 2021 10:32 AM

I used to keep a journal/diary. In extreme youth, I diligently filled up maybe six A5 hardback notebooks cover to cover (US equivalent = half letter). These are perfect as they are in terms of taking up storage space. Later, I got more sloppy (less self-interested) and started occasional journals only to give up. Consequently, I have maybe a dozen more volumes, each with about 30 or 40 pages complete. This is unsatisfying and takes up too much space. What is the easiest, most elegant way to compile the (mostly unexciting) records contained in these later incomplete journals?

Here are some ideas I have myself:

• Copy the piecemeal journals by hand into a new single volume—As preposterous as it sounds to me now, this is actually what happened with the very earliest volume I have, which began as scribbles in school notebooks. But absolutely no way am I doing anything like this now!
• Scan the pages and store the whole lot digitally—This has a space-saving appeal, but at the same time I like having this stuff in physical form. Also, I hate scanning so much that it seems like a job I would never complete.
• Scan the pages and have them printed as a photo book—This is sort of appealing, apart from the fact I hate scanning.
• Stick the pages into a scrapbook—This would be my preferred option to be honest. I could see it being doing in an evening or two. Except, of course, since I wrote on both sides of the paper, it can't be done at all!
• Put the pages in transparent sleeves or laminate them and stick them in a binder—Gets around the problem of having written on both sides of the paper, but seems like it would be such a chore and the end result would be ugly.
• Throw the whole lot in the trash—Believe me, it is tempting. These books are filled with tedious rubbish from end to end.

I can't be the only one who has had this problem. What elegant solutions have others come up with?

posted by cincinnatus c to Writing & Language (15 answers total)

Could you put them into a scrap book with washi tape down the left hand side so you could still easily access the backs of them? Not the most elegant but easier and faster and maybe more aethetic than putting them into transparent sleeves. You'd just want to make sure whatever book you were putting them in was bigger than the biggest journal pages you have.

You could also get a nicer box or two and staple/sew/glue/otherwise bind the written on pages into smaller "books" and store these all together in the boxes to have it feel "complete". If you went this route I'd probably put dates on the front of each mini-book to make it easier to find things if you want to read them.

If you do decide to get rid of them, fire is so good for feeling like you're free from all these old versions of yourself, putting them in the garbage won't feel as good.
posted by Sweetchrysanthemum at 10:42 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Sorry, just in case my casually thrown "tedious rubbish" comment derails this... these books are of zero interest to the world or any future descendents, and they aren't instructive or enlightening even for me, but I kind of like being able to look up what I was doing on this day in 1996 or 2001 or whatever, so I will probably keep hold of them just for that reason.
posted by cincinnatus c at 10:47 AM on March 24, 2021

How sentimental are you about them?

If you have a scanner with page feeder, I'd just cut the spine off the journal and feed all the pages through the scanner, so you have a digital/cloud archive. You'll need to add some dates,
posted by kschang at 10:49 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I so know this problem with the opposite pattern. Mostly blank journals are from my youth.

Variations I've tried
- tear our the pages and store with mementos on a box of paper mementos
- use the notebooks with modern notes - I now do bullet journals and need a new notebook every three months or so.
- use otter.ai to transcribe the journal contents in my own voice with an achievable ditigal text version
- toss the pages and donate the notebooks
- save it to deal with it later

It all depends on my mood when I encounter one.

Reading thread with great interest.
posted by rw at 10:50 AM on March 24, 2021

Back in high school, I had what I termed "The Eternal Notebook" because I would take out the metal spiral and remove/add paper as needed. I feel you on the not being up for the hijinks that seemed fun back in the day.

You could cut the paper out of the books, and use some kind of binding to compile them into one. This could be perfect binding (glue, pros: simplicity, cons: maybe not the most durable), buy a punch for making a discbound book (pros: simple and flexible in size, cons: notebook-like), or look into alternative binders (example from Japanese stationary).
posted by past unusual at 10:53 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

With only 30-40 pages from each journal used, I'd cut them out and try some simple book-binding techniques to make a new, smaller book. It's not hard to sew a new binding for a book that small and they don't have to be robust bindings if you're just occasionally looking back at the journals. If you have a sewing machine, you could sew the booklet together. I much prefer physical media to electronic, so I wouldn't consider the scanning options, though YMMV.
posted by quince at 10:56 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

Following from past unusual and quince: DIY binding. Years ago I took an evening course in book-binding, so a) I've restored many falling apart books b) I think "binding". Recently my journalling has been as a blog. Every 200 posts / pages, I print out back-to-back A4 and drill holes every 2 cm through the gutter margin of the stack. I then sew the volume up with a bodkin and thin cotton string. That archive will outlive me. If you cut out the written pages of your journal and interleave with a coloured sheet to indicate volume change, you'll be able to consolidate the wordy pages into data-richer chunks. Cheap and functional.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:09 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

You can "scan" by taking photos with your phone or tablet, and it's one heck of a lot faster and more forgiving than a traditional scanner ever was. (CamScanner on Android is really nice, if you'd want a recommendation, and there are equivalents for Apple devices.)

This is the method I'm using. And your journaling description could be me. I may well end up doing things with those files later, printing and pasting some parts of them into other blank books in a more condensed fashion... but by digitizing them, I don't have to decide that now.

Edit because I forgot to add: these scan by photo methods often make it really easy to automatically OCR (turn into text), too. It makes for much easier searching.
posted by stormyteal at 11:25 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ugh, I have this problem, compounded by many differently shaped/sized journals over the years. I'd slice out the written-on pages and put them in file folders, labeled by date. Recycle the blank/leftover pieces. I wouldn't scan anything unless there was a specific, legitimate need for this material in a digital format.
posted by niicholas at 11:25 AM on March 24, 2021

One option is you could look into hiring a broke English major from Taskrabbit or Thumbtack to take care of the tedious parts for you. You could say like go through these books, look for: (what I was doing that day, mentions of family members, mentions of current events, whatever), if you find something cut the page out with an x-acto knife. Then you'd at least have a smaller easier set to deal with. Then you could scan those & have the pages re-bound somehow.
posted by bleep at 12:27 PM on March 24, 2021

Also came to suggest binding. I’ve had some luck with the tutorials from Sea Lemon on YouTube. It’s been a fun new pandemic project for things around the house.
posted by icaicaer at 3:20 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

You might try removing the binding from each notebook and taking them to a FedEx copy place (formerly Kinko’s), and ask them to spiral bind them. I’ve done this with physical guidebooks, to cut out the pages I *knew* I wasn’t going to use. You may want insert a page for each year, so they are easy to find. Also, now that I think on it, the copy place sliced bindings off the books for me - they might do the same for you. I would also have them put a front and back cover (plastic) on it. Total cost was well under $20 IIRC.
posted by dbmcd at 4:17 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Trim the bindings off the journals and put them in letter boxes, a portfolio, looseleaf binders or book-shaped boxes?
posted by olopua at 8:10 AM on March 25, 2021

I wrote in personal journals for years. I couldn't search them though. I had no desire to keep the actual pages. Therefore, I transcribed them by using the microphone in Gmail and read them all out loud. Gmail does a pretty good job. Of course you have to say the punctuation and Gmail doesn't always get things right (like sun vs son or been vs. Ben, etc.) So I had to do some cleanup after each session. I skipped all the boring crap and embarrassing stuff. But now I have all the good stuff digitally and can search. Lot's more shelf space too, LOL.
Might be an option for you.
posted by luvmywife at 2:25 PM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Tear out the pages and put them in an expanding file? That would be pretty uniform and compact.
posted by Comet Bug at 12:58 AM on March 26, 2021