How to repurpose old articles,

and the joys of scanning

Greetings!

Five huge bags of rubbish, over twenty broken up cardboard boxes, and umpteen bags of recycling later, not to mention four huge boxes of stationery and other stuff I took to a charity shop, and I can finally see not only my desk, but also the whole of my office and even some empty space on bookshelves. I can even see most of the floor.

Yes, here at Freedman Towers I’ve been scanning documents that I’ve been holding onto for years, and then getting rid of the paper originals.

And what are these documents, I hear you ask. All sorts of stuff, but I’ve mostly been focusing on clippings, magazine articles I’ve had published. I’ve been storing them in ring binders, lever arch files and box files.

Box files, by Terry Freedman

My first commissioned and paid for article was published in 1990, and I was quite successful in getting more published. I say this not to boast, but simply to help you understand how many articles I must have been storing in paper form for over thirty years. Just to give you an idea — and bear in mind that I’ve slowed down a bit recently — this year alone, that is in the twelve months between the end of November 2022 and the end the end of November 2023 I’ve written around 410 articles. Those are here in Substack, other websites, a few magazines and some newsletters. If I kept them in print form I wouldn’t be able to move. As it is, I’m only about a third of the way through the box files that are crowding our loft.

As much as I imagined I would look lovingly on the magazine and newspaper clippings every so often, the truth is I’ve not looked at them at all — except accidentally when I’ve been looking for something else.

So as I say, I’ve been scanning these documents into a searchable pdf format, and storing the files in the cloud. Many of them are years, even decades, out of date, but they can be reused or repurposed, and that’s quite useful, as we’ll see.