7 Nov
2008
7 Nov
'08
2:10 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
In the real world "good enough" trumps "ideally." Without deep
pockets,
such as Google's, the only way to scan a large volume like this is to
cut the spines off the magazines and use an ADF scanner.
Look at what Al Kossow has managed to do with bitsavers. Yup, a lot of
"collectible" documents have undergone spine-ectomies, but had he simply
rented a warehouse and shelved everything, I'd guess that none of us
would have heard, much less benefited from, bitsavers.
Yup, it would be great if someone spent the time and effort to scan them
page by page, index them, and find a new home for the original copies,
and the person who received the paper copies then stored them in climate
controlled conditions. But that is unlikely, in the general case, to
ever happen.
I haven't ever seen the UK Computer Shopper, but if was anything like
the US version, there is about 95% redundancy between any two
consecutive issues -- the same adds printed each month, perhaps with
slightly different prices, in a somewhat different order each month.
Too bad there isn't an easy way to take advantage of that redundancy to
further compress the collection.
It's hard
to justify accepting - but at the same time the museum is the
logical first port of call for anyone looking for a Computer Shopper mag (for
whatever reason). Having scans of them all solves the problems nicely...
I think it would be iorresponsible to accept something like this and then
scan it and not ensure it then went to a 'good home'. I don't feel that
scans are a replacement for the original docuements (They are a lot
better than nothing, but I'd still rather have the originals of stuff
that I am interested in).
Some donors, including myself would be very upset if they heard that
their donations had been scanned and not preserved in the paper form, and
would probably never donate anything again.
As a second issue, perhaps it's just me, but I find it very difficult to
'flip through' scanned documents in the same way that I can flip through
the paper form. Something like this, which, I assume, is not going to be
indexed, is going to be very difficult to use as a scan.