The Economics of Recovering Spiritualist Journals

Now that the costs are all in, the recovery and translation of The Two Worlds for 5.3 years of its run-life is as follows:

• per-year microfilm copy costs: $125 (microfilm creation, for one year, $300)
• per-year film-to-single-page PDF conversion: $95.
• per-year PDF aggregation, cropping and indexing costs: $50
• per-year hosting costs: $5

So, recovering a single year of a 16-page weekly newspaper costs, roughly, $270 for 830-odd pages (perhaps 900 when you include special numbers, inserts and yearly indices), or (using the 900 page number) $.30 USD per page of the run.

Your mileage may vary, as the source of the film I used is notoriously expensive.

I would strongly recommend that anyone who decides they want to do this for their favorite Spiritualist publications:

• Check with me -- I am going to do others, and there's no sense in duplicating cost and effort.
• Give your film-to-PDF work to Spectrum Information Services, which (a) has equipment you'll want used (like skew correction on film images), (b) understands curatorial requirements and (c) bends over backwards to get it right for you. I can't say enough about what a great job SIS did on the film conversion.

If you have the financial wherewithal, you can do this entire process with a phone and a keyboard, and a couple trips to the post office. And, given the rate at which Spiritualist materials are being de-accessioned by libraries, it's critical in my opinion that people who know-and-care start taking these conversions into their own hands.

I am toying with the idea of building a Spiritualist Periodical Archive, so people don't have to manage their own web sites, so we get some leverage with Google in terms of search engine optimization, and so we can start maintaining central indices of people, events, places, etc. -- if that interests you, let me know.