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Erowid is scanning and digitizing the Shulgin's personal papers, photos, audio/video tapes, and other materials. Since 2015, we've spent $340K on this project out of our general budget. This month we need $40,000 for direct costs of high-resolution digitization of 40,000 photos.
Shulgin Archiving Update and Funding Needs
Shulgin Archiving: What's the Metadata?
(Includes 3 recent gems from the archives.)
Sasha and Ann Shulgin were influential elders who worked in the field of psychoactive research for decades. Their collection of primary and secondary physical materials needs to be saved (organized, archived and published)!
Earth and Fire got to know Sasha and Ann in person in 1999, after which they allowed us to photograph and scan a few items from their archives. They described that their most interesting materials had challenging privacy issues making them refuse blanket digitization/publishing permission. After years of discussion and years socializing and traveling the world to speak at conferences together, the Shulgins decided it was time to allow us to begin digitizing their private materials.
Sasha's Pharmacology and Lab Notebooks contain detailed experience reports about a wide variety of substances, as well as notes on chemical processes, formulas, sketches, and hand-drawn graphs. With Sasha's permission, the first "pharmacology" notebook was scanned and published by Erowid in 2007. The Erowid crew laboriously (and beautifully!) transcribed and re-formatted the hand-written lab books as they were digitized.
When the archiving project began, the Shulgins' trusted assistants, gregM and Tania, began redacting the names of individuals whose privacy should be protected. As the project evolved, more printed materials from Sasha and Ann's files were scanned and published. Erowid volunteers worked to transcribe hard-to-read texts and edit lab book images to improve readability. Trusted volunteers from the psychedelic community (experts in the field) have contributed their time to helping analyze, sort, and process the diverse collection.
If you'd like to help with this project, please volunteer at Erowid.org/volunteer and learn about the current status of the project.
Targeted contributions pay for professional digitization (where appropriate), staff for organizing, scanning, and processing files, and managers to wrangle the volunteers who donate their time. At present, roughly 98% (240,000) of the papers documents have been digitized, and 55,000 (25%) have been cataloged.
- Intro to the Shulgin Archiving Issue of Erowid Extracts (Feb 2016)
- Status of the Shulgin Archiving project (April 2015)
- Faces and Places: Sorting Photos in the Shulgin Archives