New subject: Making copies of Docs was: --H/Z89--

12 May 1999

...

  Thing is,
I've dealt with a number of 'professional' archivists who 
couldn't/wouldn't find docs for me. Either they'd didn't know if they had

them, or they couldn't easily get to them, or they were too valuable to 
look at (which begs the question as to why on earth they need to be kept 
if they aren't going to be used as a source of information).  
 Indeed if they were "professional" then they would be accomodating to get
 the so-called "too valuable to look at" docs in a form which could be
 looked at by folks like us or other types of researchers.   
 Agreed. For most documents produced in the last 200 years, the important 
 feature is the information that they contain, not the paper/ink that they 
 were produced with. So looking at a good copy would be equally useful.

 I can fully understand that making copies can damage documents. So why 
 don't they make 1 good copy using whatever technique causes the least 
 damage and then treat that as a semi-raare document that can be inspected 
 carefully by interested people? If it gets damaged (through excessive 
 copying, perhaps), then they could make one more copy of the original. 
But if the original is damaged in some way by making the copy (the pages
may crumble just in handling), shouldn't the original be saved with the
hope that a method of duplicating that doesn't destroy the original with
be found in the next few years? Also, if the pages fall apart with 
with handling, it may not be possible to make a copy at all.

Proposal for copying really OLD documents (I get a royalty if someone
does this and it works!)

	1) Develop a machine that performs a CAT scan of the document
	without opening it at very high resolution.

	2) process the high resolution 3D images captured to determine
	the ink patterns on each page.

	3) OCR the individual pages to recreate the original text

Simple, Right?

clint

No, it's an H/Z89 was: Re: Z-100 find ?