Cleaning out your shack? Here’s how you can curate QST articles you want to keep as a hard copy.

So, I have boxes and boxes of old QST magazines. Probably most issues from 1980 to present. All in all, that’s nearly 500 magazines. My collection likely weighs in at 300 pounds of glossy paper.

As I get older, I am trying to “thin the herd”. Over the past year, I have been disposing of many old books and paper collections. After all, most of my hard copy documents do not get much use these days. I have digital copies of most things that I want to read, especially reference books.

But, I must admit, I often like to read paper. Must be my age. So, I thought of a way to curate QST articles without keeping the whole magazine.

From Amazon, I bought some clear report covers with a sliding bar to clip to maybe 40 -50 pages of paper. Then I started going through each year of QST, month by month, and selecting articles I might want to keep on paper. With a sharp X-ACTO knife, I cut the pages along the spine. Pretty easy.

I am sorting and binding these article collections by year rather than topic.

Curating QST Articles – Or Any Others

Of course, you can use this approach to keep selected articles from any magazines. Now, I can recycle 300 pounds of paper and simplify my life.

Now, to be fair, I still have most of these magazines in digital form on my network server, if I ever want to read complete issues. But, it turns out, that is not very often. I still subscribe to QST in digital form, and I can easily print and curate particular articles I want to keep.

But, as I have written before, good technical content in QST is becoming more sparse. Anyway, this is an idea you may want to use.