Dave Caroline wrote: You have to break an egg to make an omelet. Up front, I apologize for being bristly. Putting "NOT" in caps just set me off. Have you ever availed yourself of any of the docs on bitsavers or its mirrors? Guess how large that collection would be if Al had to spend $35K for a book scanner, or had to flip pages by hand, or had to build an army of tinker-toy book scanners (like the one you mention next) in order to get throughput? I have scanned only a tiny fraction of the number of pages Al has, and it got really tiring flipping a page, orienting it on the flatbed, waiting for the scan, doing the next. I did well over a thousand pages that way before getting pragmatic about things. If the doc is spiral bound (or similar) or stapled, I'll work the staples out or the binding, scan them, then put the staple or spiral binding back in. If the doc is especially valuable, then I'll manually page flip. But otherwise, I have only the slightest twinge liberating the pages. Some manuals have three hole punches despite being bound; with an exacto knife you can cut close enough to the spine that the loose pages fit into a three ring binder. Otherwise I use a fat clip (I don't know the real name) to hold them together when I'm done. I try to scan only things which aren't available, so either the information stays nicely bound on aging paper on my shelf where only I can use it, or the spine gets removed and everybody can use the information. *Far* more information will be lost to entropy due to the existing copies rotting in peoples closets and garages than will be captured through semi-destructive scanning. If you don't want me to cut spines off of manuals, then you can prevent it -- scan it before I do. Point me at your repository of scanned work and I will promise to check there before I do any more scanning. Hurry, though, because I have four more manuals that I want to scan this weekend. In short, most of the time, the information is much more valuable than the physical manifestation of it in an individual book. I'd like to see the quality of the output -- the book isn't pressed flat, which in my experience leads to curved text in the center of the book and/or shadowing. The book in the demo shots is also midway through the book and lays relatively flat, unlike many manuals and books I have. I'd like to see the scanner scan the first few or last few pages of the book. I also wonder what is the mean number of pages between failures. Just tighten up the legos a bit; just add or maybe remove a little more counterweight and see if it works better. Bah. In the tiny wmv movie, I would guess it is at least 60 seconds per page. For a decent scanner with ADF, 30 ppm is nothing special. No, this isn't practical other than as a rickety hack. Did you watch the video of his camera-based version? It uses the same paper turning technology as the scanner one, but the video quality showing its operation is much clearer. Watch it and you'll get a sense of how practical this thing is: http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/pic/abs2.wmv If you find a book scanner that is under $1000 and works reliably, has decent quality, and doesn't require me to build it myself, let me know.

Dave Caroline wrote: I agree certain documents should not be destroyed; I have scanned some books one page at a time myself. However, that doesn't usually apply -- most manuals aren't *that* rare. Scanning the book and making it available also has value, and often more than the value of the complete, intact book. Personally I'm much less worried about the loss of value than I am about copyright issues. There are things I have scanned which I haven't put online. I could certainly work harder to acquire permission to post what I do. 90% of my scanning doesn't have such approval, although I'm fairly comfortable that the copyright holder isn't concerned. (How do I know the latter? I've been contacted by some of the principals of Processor Technology who said: "nice work", but I don't have a piece of paper with a lawyers signature on it. Getronics bought up Wang a decade ago, and while they haven't given me any legal document, the fact that they shipped me a pallet of documents, floppies, and equipment for the cost of shipping after seeing my website should count for something.) Dave, not to be snippy, but I am not sure where the punctuation goes above. Let me guess. Did I get it right? Why should the catalog predate the scanning? It isn't obvious to me. At what point do you decide your catalog is done and start scanning then? Personally, I scan when I have something to scan and I have the time. If I waited for the "right" time nothing would ever be scanned. Some of my docs: http://www.sol20.org/manuals.html http://www.sol20.org/articles.html http://www.wang2200.org/docs.html http://www.thebattles.net/bondwell/bondwell.html http://www.thebattles.net/sage/sage.html http://www.thebattles.net/oddments/oddments.html http://www.thebattles.net/wang/3300.html I have a couple more sites with corresponding documents, but they aren't online yet.

I don't have free time to scanning. It is TOO MUCH time consuming. And, without ADF (accept donations :D) it is a pain in that place the sun doesn't shine to scan. BUT I use a lot of online documents, so I give back something to the comunity. When I have something that rare, I do scan that. A pain there, you see... Alexandre :)

oops forgot the url http://www.archivist.info/collection/ some search terms im gets all instruction manuals is gets all instruction and service bk books 005 is dewey for computing my main collection is electronics and test equipment so computing is buried a bit Dave Caroline

That home scanner is not mine my book scanning is well behind 1100, but slide scanning is well advanced cataloguing has reached 15k items so at least finding is possible (if it hasnt got moved in a rush at some time and not put back). Some you wont fine on the net as I have just not copied across yet. Items like microfilm of van drivers invoices to butchers are an interesting social history but its 800 scans I will never do unless I get paid or begged and takes little space. search Robirch Dave Caroline

Sooo......no one has this book out there, then? If not, I will consider it at least "rare" and do what I can to preserve it as intact as possible. We have a print shop at work that could probably rebind it for me, although I'd still consider that sub-optimal, as I would lose the spine printing, but it may be the best I can do. I think the info contained in this catalog is valuable enough to the DEC collector community that it warrants it. As for automated book scanning, that is not in my budget, nor do I have the lego skills required ;) Is there a master list of documentation archive sites out there somewhere? There is bitsavers, vt100.net, 1000bit, and at least a couple others I've seen mentioned on this list. Perhaps someone should start a Wikipedia article or something similarly centralized so such a list could be collected. It would be handy not only for the obvious, but also for folks like me to make sure that they are not re-scanning something that's already out there.

Dave, You site is nice and will be very helpful as your content grows. Having those search terms on your search page, would be helpful, as would a hint that you support the Dewey Decimal System. Can someone search by ISBN as well? And let me echo the plea for some capitalization and punctuation in your posts. I don't think you are in any danger, but this list has banned people for less! Jim Dave Caroline wrote:

William> Rebinding softcover books is actually pretty easy, if you William> know what you are doing, and have the right tools and William> materials. Many printshops can do it. Actually, the same is true for hardcovers; it may even be easier because the main tools are thread and needle. I have a book about home bookbinding; forgot author/publisher but from what I remember it's British -- this one I believe: http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Bookbinding-W-Lewis/dp/0486201694 paul