The Rave Preservation Project

The main goal of the Rave Preservation Project is to curate rave and disco memorabilia from around the world and share digitally via the website. Specifically Rave memorabilia from the 1980's and 1990's and any year from the Disco era. 

Here are a few screenshots of the website. 

Rave Preservation Project Website home page. You can sign up for email updates, view the "Flyer Of The Week, See who has donated and link to a donors website, Find information about donating memorabilia, Read a little about me, and a few other things.

The memorabilia gallery is organized by country. 

Countries are organized by State, Province, or Region depending on the country, then City or Town, then event name or letter.

The below screenshot is the expanded view of the San Francisco Gallery. 

Why is there a need for this project?

As the years go by, old memorabilia is; lost, damage, or thrown out. This project finds these things before the aforementioned happens and puts them in a safe place under the care of the project. 

The Process.

1. Acquire by donation old rave memorabilia. 
    Mostly; flyers, posters, laminates, tickets, and stickers.

2. Clean and repair acquired memorabilia.

3. Sort all memorabilia in alphabetical order.

4. Once sorted alphabetically each letter is sorted by party then single or one off pieces.

5. After sorting an envelope is created for each party and labeled by 
    a. Party or Event 
    b. Country 
    c. State or Province 
    d. City or Town

6. Once an envelope is created and the memorabilia is added it is stored in a box. All boxes are alphabetized.

Where is this stuff stored, is it safe?

We built a home several years back and have a spacious, clean, secure, and climate controlled room dedicated to this project. 

Brief history: 

This started as a personal project. All I wanted to do is scan all my old rave flyers and posters and share them with friends online. Immediate I started to receive emails and calls from friends about how many great memories were brought up by seeing these old things. People expressed inspiration, nostalgia, then sadness as they explained how their old memorabilia had been damaged, lost, and/or thrown out. There were suggestions that a preservation project should be started to find, acquire, archive, digitize, and share these items before they were lost forever. I decided to take this project on.

I started this project March 17th 2013. Started with approximately 1,000 flyers and posters.

The Problem and Why You Should Donate!

People have donated tens of thousands flyers, posters, and other memorabilia. I estimate around 100,000 pieces all which need to be digitized. 

Currently with a modest small business scanner I spend about 10 hours scanning 100 double sided flyers that are half page or smaller. I then have to manually crop each side in Photoshop (200 sides) which usually takes 2 days working 8 hours per day. so we are looking at roughly 26 hours to scan and edit 100 double sided flyers. 

Let's look at the math

with the current scanner the time it will take to digitize the current donations:

100,000 pieces = 26,000 hours

In order to get all the memorabilia digitized in a timely manner and shared with the world I need to set up a high speed system which costs money. This is where I need your help!

I found a scanner that will scan a poster in under 8 seconds and both sides of a double sided half page flyers in 1-3 seconds. This scanner measures the physical size of each flyer or poster fed into it which allows for accurate auto cropping. This beast is equipped with two scanners which allows it to scan two sides at once. There are other tools in the software that will allow for speedy batch scanning. This scanner with tax and shipping will run around $30,000.

You can read all about it here http://www.imageaccess.us/?page=ScannersWT36DS-200&lang=en

Let's redo the math given the capabilities with this scanner at the slower time of 3 seconds for two side and auto cropping.

100,000 pieces = 83 hours

In two months, with this scanner I can digitize the donated memorabilia and share online for everyone to enjoy. (I have a day job and spend 10-20 hours a week on the Rave Preservation Project)

One of the many reasons for this project is to have original memorabilia in one place so if someone decides to write a book or produce a movie about rave or disco culture and needs a very high quality digital copy of a piece of memorabilia they can search the Rave Preservation Project website, find what they are looking for and for free request a high resolution scan. Everything will be scanned at a very high resolution for this purpose, the problem is that this requires a massive amount of local hard drive storage space. So...

...the second item needed is a big NAS (Network Attached Storage) for safe local storage.

You can read more about the NAS I have selected here (The actual cost will depend on the type of drives but $5,000 will cover the NAS, Hard Drives, Tax and Shipping) http://www.netgear.com/business/products/storage/ReadyNAS-500/RN51600.aspx

The third item needed is a fast workstation that can process the images. I have had good luck with high end HP computers which is what this is budgeted for. I have a 30 inch display that I will be able to hook up to this as well as all the networking components so no need to purchase for this project. 

The scanner, NAS, and workstation are all attached to a local network. This will be the scanning and editing station needed to digitize, code into the website, and upload to the web server. Here is the setup

Here is the breakdown of how this money will be used. 

The beautiful thing about donating to this project and helping make this project successful is that the equipment purchased will allow for future digitizing of future donated memorabilia as well as the vast collection that has already been donated and is waiting to be digitized. 

Timeline:

October 2013 - Indiegogo campaign completed

December 2013 - fulfill reward obligations

February 2014 - digitizing and sharing of memorabilia will be complete 

Me and anyone who enjoys viewing this old memorabilia will appreciate your donation. 

Remember this campaign is all or nothing so if the goal is not reached the project gets nothing. So please donate and spread the word to ensure a successful campaign and the future digitizing and sharing of all this old Rave memorabilia via 

ravepreservationproject.com

Some of the memorabilia. The room and memorabilia is kept very tidy. These photos were staged for a WIRED UK Magazine story that will run October 3rd (I will post the link when the story runs). 

PEACE LOVE UNITY RESPECT

Matthew Johnson

Rewards:

$1 or more: You name added to the website as a donor

$100 or more: the above plus a 10 pack of stickers (Design may change slightly)

$500 or more: The above plus a fabulous "I DONATED" Rave preservation Project T-Shirt (Logo placement and size may change)