Ask HN: Ideas for digitizing historic significant computer magazine collection? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ideas for digitizing historic significant computer magazine collection?

4 pointsandrewstuart6 comments

(Australian context, but input from anyone on this topic would be valued).

I'm starting work on a project to get a historically important computer magazine collection professionally digitized for preservation and release to the public.

There are at least ten years worth of monthly magazines there and we want to get every page including all the advertisements digitized. Doing it well would be an epic task.

Any ideas, thoughts or input on how to get that done to a high quality, with great respect for ensuring the source magazines are preserved?

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Not so sure about "epic task," mostly just "labor-intensive" task, coming from someone who's built a few book scanners and preserved material in a few different ways.

Lots of established practices in this area, but it all depends on time, budget, and level of effort. Are you looking to do it yourself? Do you have a budget? Do you need to do it on-site or can you ship them somewhere? Are you expecting to preserve the physical magazines, or do you expect to destroy them in the process?

Hoping to get government grant funding from the various history preservation programs.

I wonder how much approx it might cost to get professional digitization done of ~ 120 to 150 magazines.

There's still a few unanswered questions; the answers make a difference.

That said, the Internet Archive scans and preserves material for US$0.10/page, including storing it in one of their warehouses. 150 100-page magazines would be, uh, a US$1500 donation.

For that, you'd get ~300dpi scans (actually photographs) of each page, taken with a DSLR without damaging the magazine.

That's about the page count and what I donated to preserve the out-of-print works of Jan V. White: http://www.janvwhite.org

To get higher resolution scans, generally you either need even more expensive, larger format digital cameras (41MP gets you 8.5x11 at 600dpi), or multiple cameras stitching the photographs together, or to do destructive scanning, cutting the binding and feeding the pages through a high-resolution sheet-fed or flatbed scanner (don't do this).

Hi Vitovito

Thanks for your reply.

>> Are you looking to do it yourself? No

>> Do you have a budget? The idea is to raise funds from government grants to pay for high quality scanning

>>Do you need to do it on-site or can you ship them somewhere? I'm assuming we'll need to ship the collection somewhere - ideally Sydney or Canberra but if there is a compelling case perhaps elsewhere - there would be a fairly high level of anxiety about losing the collection in shipping.

>>Are you expecting to preserve the physical magazines, or do you expect to destroy them in the process? To preserve, ideally perfectly.

While the Internet Archive sells and supports their scanning hardware, and there are community plans if you wanted to build your own, since you don't have a budget and don't want to do it yourself, perhaps the National Library of Australia's "Trove" project is a better avenue:

http://trove.nla.gov.au

They're a partner with IA as part of the Open Content Alliance, and they provide complete end-to-end non-destructive scanning and hosting services through the Trove site and software:

http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/digitisation-partner-guidelines

150 magazines * 100 pages * AU$1.65 for a "journal" page is AUD$24,750, plus whatever it will cost you to "negotiate and document reproduction permission with copyright owners."

(For that price you alternatively could buy the Internet Archive's scanner, but you'd still need labor to operate it. Or, for US$1750 you could get the parts for a DIY book scanner, and then use the rest of the money to hire people to build and operate it, which might cost less, maybe. The results wouldn't be guaranteed, however, as they would be through IA or Trove, and you'd still need to host it and the content somewhere.)

Ship it all to Jason Scott?

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