Subject: Re: scanning booklets for archive

From: "Erik Klein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 22 12:39:00 2003

> I finally have a scanning system setup here for archiving documents.
 
On a tangentially related note, we've just started an effort at the VC 
Forum to track scanned documents.

Think of it as an index to available online documents of interest to 
vintage computer collectors.

It's just in its infancy, but I think it's a great idea and I hope we 
have success with it.

The thread at http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/viewtopic.php?
t=241 covers my interpretation of the effort.  I'm sure it will evolve 
somewhat over time.

Please feel free to drop by and comment or help out!

Thanks,

   Erik Klein
   www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum
   The Vintage Computer Forum

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From: "Antonio Carlini" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 23 02:11:00 2003

> Forum to track scanned documents.

Good idea, although keeping track of a large number of documents
in a thread like that will not scale well. You want to scrape
the data and turn it into a web-accessible database.

Like http://vt100.net/manx, but for all docs and not
just DEC ones.

You might want to decide exactly what information you want to
record now (location and title obviously but what about format,
dpi, scanned vs ocr vs scan+ocr, colour, approx size ...)
before you have to go back and retrofit that data to the
existing 600 entries (been there, got the T-shirt).

Antonio
 
-- 

---------------
Antonio Carlini             [email-masked]

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From: Paul Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 23 03:05:01 2003

> Like http://vt100.net/manx, but for all docs and not

Manx is intended to cover more than just DEC documents, but I've been 
concentrating on populating those first; there are over 4000 manuals in 
the catalogue so far, of which over 1500 are online.

Manx already has a database structure that can accommodate multiple 
companies and plenty of information about each manual, including 
abstracts, table of contents and full text index.

I suppose I really need a way for third parties to add items to Manx. It 
can already import tab-separated-variable files, which makes it very 
easy to do a load of searching for new manuals and then add the results. 
I'll look into this.

- Paul

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From: Vintage Computer Festival <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 23 09:41:00 2003

> the catalogue so far, of which over 1500 are online.

I've never heard of your effort before, but I just checked it out and it's
terrific!  You should definitely put up a form for user submissions.  Or
in the very least, setup other people with administration rights so you
can have a cadre of dedicated folks scouring the internet and reporting
their findings of online manuals to the database.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

 * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

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From: Paul Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 23 13:00:01 2003

> their findings of online manuals to the database.

Thanks. I should have announced it properly here but I never got round 
to it, and Antonio has been citing it weekly anyway!

Now I've got broadband and moved the local copy of my site from work to 
home, I'll have more time to work on it. The search engine currently has 
limitations that will be improved in the next version (so that ToC and 
full text searching will work, for one thing). I'll look at an admin 
facility and bulk upload as well.

The feature that has really got my interest is adding an API like that 
used for Google or Amazon. If you're into web applications at all and 
you've not seen either of these, you should take a look. Adding an API 
would mean that Manx's database could be used by other applications 
without using Manx's front end. At the simplest level, other 
applications could just send an ordinary HTTP request to Manx and get a 
well-formed XML response, which can be easily parsed into whatever form 
you want for your application.

I won't say more here because we'll be veering off-topic into web 
programming and some people will be expecting timescale information. 
I'll stick more info up on the site soon.

- Paul