Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
ascii.textfiles.com
ascii.textfiles.com
tl;dr: A technical manual reseller in Finksburg, MD is throwing out 25,000 high-quality paper manuals from as far back as the 1930s this week and Jason Scott & friends are driving there with "$900 of banker's boxes" to save whatever they can.
Or even come into possession of one of those systems and have no idea how to use it. If google hadn't crawled the manual for certain products I would have thrown away a number of electronic paperweights.
Even if you're used to looking at discrete transistor circuits (and even that is getting rare these days), a device with tubes can look like magic of the highest order.
(This goes double if the manual was annotated by a good operator)
Also, my EE studies largely skipped over the analog world entirely. There were two courses on linear circuits, but they talked very little about analog (not a single mention of a vacuum tube to be found). Your assumption that a second year EE student could explain this to you is no longer correct in 2015 as most programs are similar to what I went through.
authors blog http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/
free book download: http://www.lejabeach.com/sisubb/BIOS_Disassembly_Ninjutsu_Un...
It isnt some arcane knowledge only dying out grey beards would know about.
I have another post on this thread where I talk about some uses I've had for old manuals. That's the sort of thing I'm getting at. The GE engine manuals, for instance, aren't arcane in the context of CH-46 maintenance, but in the broader context of printed material they are extremely arcane.
Anyhow, cool project.
"Prototype 1 could scan the majority of books without damage, but may tear one or two pages in some books. Out of 50 books tested, 45% had one or two of their pages either torn or folded. This is a very early prototype and there are many areas for improvement in the design."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds63ZBXFdLM http://www.kirtas.com/
50 pages per hour with no damage to the books.
You're looking at $50k-$90k for the equipment plus $8k/year service contract, though. So you need to figure out whether book scanning is something that the Internet Archive is interested in, beyond this project.
As a young hobbyist and later engineer I learned TONS out of data books, application guides and equipment manuals. I'd spend hours paging through data books, learning about the various chips, going through the application notes, building circuits, testing them and studying schematics when equipment actually came with schematics.
Anyone who was "all in" in electronics did exactly the same.
To this day I've kept my National Linear Applications books and a few others. eBooks have yet to capture the speed and convenience of holding a 500 page book in your hands that you can page through and explore. Worst yet, having five or six such books spread across your workbench as you work on a design.
That said, having the ability to search books or, better yet, your entire library, is useful. I don't buy programming books in paper form any more. And, I still prefer PDF to any other eBook format. For me it tends to be a far better experience across platforms.
This thread has made me think about the idea of digitizing my physical books. I find myself thinking about this every few months. I have both engineering and business books that will never be available in electronic form and I would definitely like to preserve them and make the searchable.
Is there a service or a device one could use for this purpose. The linear book scanner seems interesting yet apparently it is known to damage books. A service could be interesting but it would have to be comparable to buying a book, meaning, $20 per book or thereabouts, not $500 (or whatever). This would mean they'd have to have a slick and low cost means to digitize books or monetize the process in some form beyond charging for digitizing.
Building a scanner could be interesting, of course. I'm thinking about bringing this up as a project for the FIRST FRC robotics team I mentor. You never know what the kids might come up with.
Any resources on this front?
If procuring (and paying nearly $10K USD per year in maintenance fees) through a hacker collective or maker space is infeasible in your area, then the community at www.diybookscanner.org have a workable solution for a much smaller subset of what the Kirtas units address, so you could look into that as a modest workaround for the time being (though I wonder what results they got for dewarping by simply taking pictures on all the sides of the scanning target to synthetically construct a 3D volume, as perfect dewarping continues to be an open and unsolved problem).
Most books have page numbers; couldn't they use that along with OCR to detect and retry skipped pages? Maybe even a state that shakes the pages more than usual in an attempt to separate ones stuck together. It doesn't sound too difficult to do (perhaps you'd have to tell it where the page number is), given what the Kirtas machine costs.
The Kirtas units seem highly-regarded by conservators; they might have lots of objections to even gentle shaking of their sometimes fragile charges. The impression I get is that the slight vacuum employed by the Kirtas on pages is the most handling that is accepted. There might be recent developments in computer vision and robotic fingers which could see an improved robotic analog to a human page flipper in the future.
My personal hunch is the popularization and (relative) mass adoption of the slower, lower-tech open source book scanners will eventually outstrip the dedicated scanning throughput of the high-end units, and put more digitized content onto the Net, along with a legal fight over content "abandoned" by publishers. When I digitize my content, it goes into my private collection, but I sure wish publishers were more aggressive with digitization of the older material, or lenient with letting that older material go into the public domain if they aren't even chasing the long-long-long tail of that material anymore.
I'm not sure I do understand the motivation, but I don't think that I'm beyond understanding it. Is it that some of these systems are still in service? Is it just the history/archeology aspect?
I think it would be more correct to say that it isn't only about that. As somebody above pointed out, "technology never dies". You'd be shocked what you'll find still running out there if you look in the right places. Forget Silicon Valley for a minute... go find a manufacturing plant in the midwest or in the southeast somewhere, or even in the rust belt. A plant that makes some kind of goofy sub-assembly for producing something, where none of us have even though about that sub-assembly or would know what it was if we saw it. In that kind of place you'll still find all sorts of seemingly archaic technology... old IBM mainframes with drum hard-disk drives where the drum weighs about 50 lbs and stores 50MB of data. IBM S/36 and S/38 minicomputers, DEC PDP/11's, old VAX machines, you name it, it's out there. Heck, go check in some non-profit telephone cooperative somewhere in rural america... I'd be you'll find more of the same there. And so on, and so on...
1) I was tasked with instrumenting the T58-GE-16 engines in a CH-46 [0]. So what did I need to inform my sensor placement and selection? Some schematics and technical manuals, all from the late 1960s, all undigitized.
2) I needed to reverse engineer an old test set. The documentation had been lost to time. When I cracked it open, I saw lots of 5400 & 7400 series chips. Now, this is kind of a trite example, because lots of working EEs still have copies of the TTL Data Book at hand. But still, I needed to refer to that old tome when working on this project.
3) When I worked at a NASA contractor, a primary piece of equipment failed. We needed a replacement in a hurry. Fortunately, someone had kept the older version of this system around. It dated from 1959 (!) but the manual was still around, too. A quick read through that manual got us back in business.
Technology never dies [1]. But without the manuals to understand that technology, things become much harder when you need to use that technology again.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Vertol_CH-46_Sea_Knight
[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/to...
[0]: http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/3/0/8/16...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...
It's why I keep reposting links like the Bitsavers manuals just in case someone needs them one day.
When our test aircraft were being delivered, me and the other guys who work on the instro systems would ask, "Who was the asshole?" In other words, who took it upon themselves to be the person who made sure that things came together properly during buildup and checkout? The one aircraft we got where no one had stepped up for instrumentation and been the asshole has proven to be the most problematic of all the aircraft.
Maybe not the most elegant way to put it, but there you have it.
From an archaeological perspective, think about it 100 years from now (assuming there is no catastrophe -- a different topic).
Information lost now is lost forever. People in the future trying to reconstruct the past may well need various kinds of information that does not seem valuable today.
It's parallel to any library. Only a small fraction of any library will be of direct interest to any given person, but the collection overall is trying to serve a community, whether individuals see why various parts are useful or not.
> Why are these even worth anything or worth keeping, tidy your life, lighten up, etc.
This is an individual's thinking. The other point of view is about serving the larger community -- and not just now, but with very long term benefits.
Once they have the books in storage, the next step is to take a picture of each cover, and put those on line. With an inventory, people will be able to ask for (and perhaps pay for) digitization.
http://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/askanarchivist-day-oc... https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ssa+twitter+archivist
If they can be removed from the shelves and boxed at an average rate of 5 per second, that's 5,000 seconds or <1.5h at the most. Even after adding in trips to the new storage location, packaging, unloading, etc., and considering it's a trivially parallelisable task, it definitely seems doable to move the whole collection of 25k within a few hours.
Still, even if it's 100 person-hours, it's an achievable goal; A dozen volunteers over the course of a day can do so.
If you look at the pictures like this one:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/IMG_69...
I could probably grab 25 or more of those at a time and set them in a box in 5 seconds, hence 5 per second. Getting the first ones out (because there is little "gap" to stuff hands into on the shelf) will be slower, but once the gap is made the whole pile easily comes out. This isn't about pulling one out at a time, spending another few seconds inspecting it, and then putting it in a box; it's about getting them off the shelves and out of the building ASAP.
Actually, it is. Many of the manuals are duplicated and they are only interested in keeping one unique copy of each. The duplicates will be immediately discarded. Obviously they will want to keep the highest quality copy of each manual for digitisation, so the process involves taking the manual from the shelves, checking to see if it is a duplicate, finding the highest quality version among the duplicates, and keeping the best one.
They can't just run through the shelves, grabbing 25 manuals at a time and throwing them in to a box.