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A visit to the city archives showed me a huge shift in how we keep records
I had to pull some old property line drawings for a client last week, so I went down to the municipal archives. I was expecting the usual big, dusty flat files, but the whole room is different now. They've scanned almost everything from before 1985 onto these massive servers. The archivist told me they're getting rid of the original mylar sheets because they're 'a fire hazard and take up too much space.' It made me think about all the subtle line weights and handwritten notes that just don't show up the same on a screen. We're losing the physical craft of it, trading the feel of a vellum original for the convenience of a PDF. Has anyone else run into a situation where the old way of storing drawings is just gone?
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finley_price241mo ago
Forget the scans, the real loss is the metadata that dies with the originals. Those old sheets have coffee stains, pencil smudges, even tiny tears that tell you which pages were actually used on site. A perfect digital file erases the whole history of the thing, like it was never a real object someone carried around in a tube. The archive becomes a gallery of ghosts, not a record of work.
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jana_scott1mo ago
Yeah, the line weights and handwritten notes thing is real. I had to check some old sewer plans from the 70s last month. The scan was so bad you couldn't read the contractor's stamp in the corner. The original would have been fine. Now I tell clients to get a high-res scan themselves if they can, before the city tosses the paper. Ask the archivist for the scanner settings, sometimes they use a low DPI to save space. It's a pain but it's the only way to catch those details.
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