London-based HYMAG has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help it survive. The magazine archive, which was officially designated the largest in the world, features hundreds of thousands of magazines and acts as an important resource for researchers, students, publishers, historians and more.

HYMAG is built on a life’s passion for magazines, it celebrates and credits the creator and the collector, and the treasure troves of donors who share its determination to preserve and document the past, present, and future of print.

HYMAG was founded in 2011 by James Hyman, who began collecting magazines in the 1990s as a way to document and preserve the history of print. The crowdfunding website explains that donations will go towards the “maintenance, conservation and storage” of more than 150,000 magazines and 10 million cuttings from Edda Tasiemka‘s archive. Known as “the Human Google,” Tasiemka collected cuttings about a huge variety of topics and people from the 1950s onwards.

“When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the internet, there was a practical – as well as compulsive – reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines, the foresight that this was going to be something else, more than a collector’s dream…it’s all about preserving and documenting the history of print.”– The New York Times.

Additionally, HYMAG plans to digitize the extensive archive for a new platform launching next year. Money raised through the crowdfunding process will also be used to achieve this, creating a new resource for those interested in magazines.