22 Nov
2006
22 Nov
'06
2:39 p.m.
In general, I think its a bad idea to have everything
in any community
funnel through a single person. What happens if Al (knock on wood)
should get injured and can't do scans anymore? If we adopted the
"well, just let Al scan everything because he knows how to do it" and
it never gets documented on what is the best way to scan documents,
then we lose everything connected to document scanning when we lose
Al.
The only thing that currently has me as the bottleneck is actually putting
things onto the web site. I have loaned several people now scanners and as
you say, it isn't a good thing to rely on a single person to do all of the
work. One area that would be useful would be having others help in the
cleanup/post-processing of the raw scans. There is only about 25% of what
I've scanned currently on line.
The things I try to concentrate on are materials that are rare and out of
the mainstream. There are others, for example, that are taking care of
microcomputer docs. I also like to collect material on digital magnetic
storage devices, for their use in data recovery.
I really don't claim to have any 'special knowledge'. There is a particular
document processing flow that I prefer to use to have the documents have a
consistant 'look' to them. It does change over time, though. I have started
adding color cover pages recently as well as more grayscale pictures.