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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Kickstarter Campaign: Help preserve and share the Locus Magazine archives

I checked out the Kickstarter link and they have already met their goal of $9,500. Nevertheless, the more money they accumulate, the more easily it will be for them to distribute the Locus material once it's been digitized.

From I09: Help preserve and share the Locus Magazine archives
Over the past 60 years, Charles N. Brown and Locus Magazine haven't just chronicled the evolution of science fiction — they've also documented the history of the genre. Brown accumulated a huge treasure trove of materials, including items from authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Octavia E. Butler.

Now the Locus Foundation is asking for $9,500 on Kickstarter to digitize, preserve and share this wealth of material, and it's an excellent chance for fans and readers to give something back.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040521099/locus-photo-and-ephemera-archive-project

Locus writes:

Our goal is to fund the preservation of a historic and irreplaceable collection of materials covering the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields, including author and convention photos, correspondence, and other ephemera, accumulated by Charles N. Brown and Locus magazine over the past 60 years. Help us stabilize the archive, digitize the photos and letters, and make available to fans, writers, scholars, and resarchers the almost 40,000 of pieces of SF/F history we have in this collection.

About Locus: Charles N. Brown (1937-2009) was active as a collector, fan, editor, and publisher in the SF/F field since the late 1940s, beginning with editing fanzines and chairing conventions while still a teenager. In 1968, he co-founded Locus, which grew from a fanzine into the news magazine of the science fiction community. It was expanded to include interviews, reviews, articles, convention reports, book listings, etc. and stands as the journal of record for the field. Brown spent his entire life collecting SF books, magazines, photos, and ephemera, and in his will gifted his estate, including the magazine and his collection, to the Locus SF Foundation.

About the collection: The Locus Collection (the Charles N. Brown Memorial Collection) comprises an impressive array of genre holdings. This includes a collection of historic photographs, ephemera, and correspondence — the Photo and Ephemera Collection — as well as over 30,000 volumes (roughly 20,000 book titles and 10,000 periodical titles) with many rare and first editions, manuscripts, and extensive runs of pulp magazines, audio interviews, slides, and more.

The Photo and Ephemera Collection encompasses a historically significant archive of photographs from Brown's over five decades working in the science fiction and fantasy fields, as well as letters from authors and publications from conventions, conferences, and more. The archive, amounting to roughly 44 linear feet of materials, is currently housed in filing cabinets, and provides records for approximately 4,000 individuals, including virtually every author of note in the science fiction and fantasy field for the last 60 years, such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia E. Butler, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, etc., as well as editors, publishers, book agents, and convention organizers.

Our goal is to preserve these historic and irreplaceable materials, by stabilizing the archive and at the same time digitizing the photos, letters, etc., and creating a viewable gallery of as many of the materials as possible. The funding that we are seeking for this project will cover the cost of archival and preservation supplies such as acid-free tissue for interleaving documents, plastic sleeves for preserving significant photographs, acid-free folders for organization, acid-free labels and pens, a mid-range document and film scanner, long-term archival storage boxes, and finally, the cost of website construction to create a viewable gallery of the Photo and Ephemera Collection.

And there are some pretty neat rewards, including author photo postcards and framable author photos. [Kickstarter]

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