Date : Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:13:47 +0100
From : dllm@... (Dave Moore)
Subject: The Micro User
From: Andrew <aw29009@...>> > To be honest, it does seem a shame to
> > destroy any old Acorn magazines
> > given the non-permanancy of the web. I'd prefer a slightly distorted
> > image and the knowledge that they still exist in a well-kept library.
I think there are still enough copies of the [mainstream] publications in
circulation to warrant "destruction" of 1 x set of each, without losing too
much sleep.
Like Dave Edwards, I also effectively have two full sets of Acorn Users, Micro
Users, Electron Users etc, plus many more duplicates, that I'm willing to
"sacrifice" for the cause if need be.
From: Brian Foley <bfoley@...>
> If they do eventually get scanned, I'd be all for buying a half decent
> USB hard disc, posting it to the scanner, and getting an offline
> backup of the originals that way.
>
> If several of us did this, we'd have a multiply redundant, geographically
> distributed set of backups which should be safe for some time to come.
Good idea.
Then perhaps those in possession of lossless scans could offer a DVD-R
duplication service on an at-cost basis?
Or perhaps even "sell" external HDDs filled with scans, at the cost price of
the HDD?
> For some back of the envelope calculations, an uncompresed 300dpi colour
> page would be about 24MB, greyscale 8MB. If an issue was roughly 50% B&W
> and 150 pages, you'd get about 2.4GB an issue. At 268 issues, that brings
> us up to about 640GB.
As I mentioned in my last message, you can reduce the size of greyscale images
from 8Mb to approx 1-2Mb with careful adjustment of contrast/white balance.
OTTOMH the size of an entire magazine (stored as lossless PNG) will work out
at around 1.2Gb-1.8Gb depending on number of pages, ratio of full-colour pages
to B&W etc.
> Perhaps at some point we could donate a copy to archive.org, although
> I'm not sure what the legal situation would be like there.
Incidentally, I already have permission from Finnybank to host scans of Acorn
User, Micro User and Electron User @ the Acorn Preservation site (where we
have 100s of Gigs worth of [php/MySql-enabled] server space available ...
From: "Chris Thornley" <C.J.Thornley@...>
> You could OCR them instead. With recent improvements, like with Omni page
16
> that seems to come with most recent scanners like the canon range. The
> recognition quality is very good and the output could easily be compressed
> as pdf for archive purposes.
My personal preference would be to turn the scans into PDFs then add an OCR
layer, so you end up with faithful reproductions that are also
searchable/indexable.
Also, rather than make one person responsible for scanning/editing/ocr'ing
each issue, I think we would end up with a more consistent-looking set of
scans if we were to 'assign' ONLY ONE of the following responsibilities to
each person, or group of people
e.g.
- Create raw scans
- Edit scanned pages (i.e. straighten pages; tidy up the edges; remove paper
texture, creases and other blemishes)
- Combine the pages into PDFs and add OCR layers
From: Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>
> In article <314mFTNIO6388S10.1213970833@...>, Dave
> Moore <dllm@...> writes
> >
> >(I can't help but feel 600dpi is overkill for magazines, as you'd end up
> >requiring terabytes and terabytes of space to store the lossless
versions).
>
> The files should be highly compressible though?
PNGs are already highly optimised. So compressing them will have little to no
effect.
Anyway, I've nearly finished my first stab at creating a process for tracking
Scanning Progress, and will post details here shortly ...
--
Dave.