Blank Cassettes
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It wasn't very long ago that an important part of a field linguist's armamentarium was his or her stock of cassette tapes. One didn't want to run out, so one was always trying to find good quality tapes at a good price and kept stashes of them in cool, dry places.
I was just tidying up and came across a dozen blank cassettes that had been in storage. My first reaction was to carry them down to the windowless room in the basement in which I store tapes and CDs and photographs, but as I came back up the stairs it occurred to me that I will never use them. I think that it has been more than five years since I made an analog recording.
What is to be done with blank cassettes? I don't think that there is anyone to give them away to: even little kids and people in less developed countries have gone digital. They're too common for a museum to want or even nieces and nephews and grandchildren.