Hi guys,
Good to see this discussion here (and thanks for the shout out, Paolo!)
Yes, if you weren't aware mu:zines is a non-commercial, labour of love, crowdsourced project to scan, archive and republish UK music tech magazines from the 70s-2000s, including early Sound On Sound, Electronics & Music Maker, Music Technology, and many others. The content is important and deserves to be made available and accessible before it gets lost forever - which is why I've undertaken to do it.
Like many people, I was also dismayed when Keyboard mag folded, and hoped for a community project to collect and archive them. At that time it was impractical for mu:zines (ie, me) to do much about it - I already have quite a lot of my plate handling the 1000+ UK issues we are covering.
However, in the intervening years, no Keyboard archive project happened, or even looked like it was likely. Also, we started to take on some extra, non-UK publications where there was an opportunity and good reason - for instance we got the permissions from Paia to archive Polyphony, and in just a few weeks completed a full Polyphony archive (as PDFs - we're still working through fully OCR'ing the issues). We also plan to do the same with Synapse, in conjunction with Doug Lynner.
Myself and Mike (Magman) have been having discussions about Keyboard off and on for the last few years. And in fact, on my to do list for later this year as a first tentative step was to reach out and contact Keyboard's former editors and owners to see whether they would be open to us doing something similar for Keyboard, and to figure out whether it was feasible, and in what form.
(Realistically, I'm not going to be able to OCR and tag everything immaculately in the way I'm doing for the UK mags, as I'm just one guy and it would take the rest of my lifetime to do it - but I'm certainly open to collecting, curating and archiving the issues on mu:zines and am also open to other suggestions as to how to keep this content alive.)
Some of the magazines mu:zines covers include former Future-owned publications, and when I contacted Future Publishing some years back they had no problems with us archiving the content, but they had no assets from these old magaziness left and couldn't be of any further help. (Bear in mind at this time these publications were all 20-30 years old, and I wasn't going near considering properties that were still actively being published eg Future Music, for obvious reasons.) I've no idea what Future's attitude would be for the Keyboard content, or even how much they own. Stephen Fortner's post illustrates that this might be a problem, at least for the more recent issues. Older ones may be less of a problem, as they have less commercial value to the publisher. But as you can expect, sometimes these things can be tricky...
Note: In most cases, the ownership of the article content tends to (at least in the UK, I'm not as familiar with the way it's handled in the US) revert to the individual authors after a set publication window, so there's often not so much of a problem with publisher permissions, by and large (at least that's my experience, so far). I've not done too much research into US publications to date as, like I say, it's been a bit outside of our remit so far.
We're in touch with many of the former publishers, editors and contributors for the magzine content we are archiving and to date everyone I'm in contact with has been impressed and overwhelmingly supportive of what we're doing.
For more details about us and how we handle archive content, you can read:-
http://www.muzines.co.uk/about
http://www.muzines.co.uk/terms
http://www.muzines.co.uk/faq
Mike (Magman) was the interested party regarding the Keyboard issues - he already has a small collection, but we would be looking to complete the collection, either by acquiring the issues between us, and/or accepting scans from helpful contributors, which has generally worked quite well. The wider the workload spread, the more can be achieved in a small amount of time. In this manner we've been able to nearly complete collections of all the publications we're currently handling.
As we are (minimally) donation-supported, we have a very small budget to purchase content, and obviously US issues complicate things in regard to shipping and so on, which is why it's a bit of an extra headache (having people willing to scan their issues would be even more important in this case). It's another reason I've been a bit reticent to commit to starting a Keyboard archive at this time, or even announce any intentions to do so.
But who else is going to do it?
Maybe it would be enough to scan whatever issues people have to the Internet Archive in a sporadic and unmoderated manner - which would be better than nothing - but less satisfactory if no one is trying to actively fill gaps and curate the collection... But really I think the importance of the publication and content is worthy of better handling than that - and that's certainly the impression I get reading the above posts.
In any case - I'm willing to help do *something*, if something can be done.
ben@mu:zines