Brian Kerr

The New Yorker DVD set is available for pre-order (but won’t ship until fall). A hundred bucks gets you 4,109 issues of The New Yorker spanning precisely eighty years on eight DVDs.

A recent article in the Times described it as follows:

The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.

The magazine’s card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine’s office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication’s insurance company found the catalog to be “irreplaceable and beyond value,” Mr. Remnick said.

I’m excited about this for several reasons.

(1) After I started reading The New Yorker (by way of Liana and co.), I chilled in the grad library reading old issues, and it’d be fun to do so at home.

(2) I’m glad to hear that there is a separate cartoon index (no word on movie reviews yet, although there’s always the Film File).

(3) There’s an interesting book/thesis/etc. waiting to be written about the weird history of advertisements in this snooty loss-leader of a magazine; I can hardly wait to read it.

Probably the more responsible reason to be excited is that magazine archives are fucking great, and anything that opens them up for deep search and/or random access is awesome. Even if that anything costs money, or is marketed as more of a toy than a tool.

Magazines are like weblogs. 90% of the time, you only care about the contents of the new issue, the front page. But it’s the other 10% of the time — when you need to (1) find, (2) retrieve, and (3) reuse something old — that really proves their value. The library solves the second problem, but for the first, you really need one of these, cheap and functional and not behind a wall of money or academic library access:

It’s time to move beyond sequential access, and this is something like a start.

(For a different approach, see that taken by Harper’s Magazine, which hired Paul Ford and his mythical sitekit to develop a much richer form of archival access with the dual attractions of being web-based and free, but it is alas very shallow, as in: only goes back a few years and doesn’t include full contents. Consider also Economist.com. Both of these magazine sites are biased towards sliced-and-diced reuse of recently-published writing, which is a blast to read but scales poorly, if at all, back into the archives. Someday, a good magazine will be a brand beginning with this week’s paper issue, and ending with a Montfort-style encyclopedic, explorable space — however small — infused with that organ’s style, bias, and charm.)