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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

I doubt you'll get anywhere near 5 per second, even with a large number of people working on it. A single person will likely need 5-10 seconds to grab a manual from a shelf, place it in a banker's box, and move on to the next one. You'd need 25-50 people to get that.

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.

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A single person will likely need 5-10 seconds to grab a manual from a shelf, place it in a banker's box, and move on to the next one.

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.

Keep in mind, you also have to remove just one unique copy of each set, and throw the rest away, being very careful not to accidentally throw out a "duplicate" that is actually a similar-looking, but unique, manual.

Given the really hard time limit, wouldn't it make more sense to grab everything as quickly as possible and the sort them over a couple months? That requires more storage space but has the advantage of a bounded, easily-calculated maximum time.

Depends how many duplicates there are. If there are eight of each manual, then you are talking about eight times as many boxes. One truckload is now eight truckload, one storage unit is now eight storage units. And now you have to pay for discarding 7/8 of the manuals, which is not free.

> This isn't about pulling one out at a time, spending another few seconds inspecting it, and then putting it in a box;

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.

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