12 Feb
2009
12 Feb
'09
8:57 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On the archiving note, when/if I take possession of the Nicolet
system, there is a lot of documentation and software that goes with
it. I'd like to try and get as much of that as possible on Bitsavers;
what is the usual process for doing that? I don't have a scanner handy
and I really don't have the time to manually scan 1000+ pages of docs.
The same goes for the PDP-11.
John
--
"I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS
reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C,
Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba
I get the
impression
that there is NO effort by any official archive to collect manuals and
such
Stanford Library special collections have the Ampex and Apple archives,
which contain manuals.
The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota as well as
the institution I work for (The Computer History Museum) have extensive
manual collections. Test equipment is out of the scope of CBI or CHM's
collecting scope, though.
test equipment seems to be a poorly covered area
in the museum
and archive world.
But seems to be getting coverage from private collectors and some companies
(like Agilent).
If there were significant numbers of people from universities at this
conference,
you should have noticed that they have problems enough trying to fund the
archiving
of the contents that their own institutions, without actively collecting on
the outside.
This reminds me of a friend from years ago that was a fan of steam traction
engines.
No "official" institution collected documentation on them, but there were
preservation
organizations that kept their own archives. The problem, of course, is if
the society
is disbanded without a long-term recipient for the material collected.