I’m in the somewhat laborious process of decommissioning files from two books. I hate sorting through paper. I’m organized inside computers, not outside them. There are tons of things that were important at the time and can now be recycled, including these two pages (which as you can see from the scan-through are already recycled drafts of “What If Interactivity Is the New Passivity?”). I won’t bother you with scans of the manuscript in its various different stages, but the materiality of print is hard to ignore when surveying the masses of paper that were produced before the final book was put into print. Reduced to an incunabulum, my copy of the advance version of the book (ie, bound, uncorrected proofs for reviewers) has been retired to the Museum of Quirky Communication Technologies With a Special Emphasis on the Obsolete, at least until I think of a better home for it. The Sound Studies Reader, though longer, produced less paper in my home and office. If you include the piles of paper produced by all the authors in the preparation and original publication of their essays, it would yield an awesome mountain.
are you scanning things to throw away? I have some paper copies of advertisements for high tech companies published in the 90s that I finally threw away this year, from a book I published in 2002! I’ve been burned by doing this for images, but I’ve never regretted throwing away any typescript thing. It can always be found online somewhere!
Yeah, I’m freeing myself of large piles of paper. I’m not actually scanning things like these notes, I just did it for the blog. My grand plan is actually to get rid of a whole file cabinet’s worth of stuff in my office at school to make room for more bookcases.
I’m not sure if this would be your thing, but some university archives will work with people on collecting and boxing papers and other material for writers who are doing their thing. Some might be quite interested in material like old photos that are wonderful documents of a significant moment, but just gathering dust on a shelf; or late drafts of works that are steeped in the argument of an important work, but might have material excised from the final version.