A great saga of rescue and preservation is coming towards its end, and there’s a chance to bask in the victory, and help push towards its conclusion.
I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the manuals business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, tens of thousands of unique manuals, many nowhere else.
Then they were stored in a storage unit. Then they were stored in a closed coffee house. Then they were transported to Internet Archive’s Physical Archive. Then they were stored until last year, 2023.
Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort four pallets of the manuals for products related to the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are finished, except for a few stragglers. The loop has closed!
You can browse the collection of thousands of scanned manuals here:
And now, the pitch.
The company doing the digitizing does lots of digitizing for the Internet Archive. They are well-paid and legitimate professional contractors who are sent the items, and who do careful scanning to the best of the materials’ ability to provide access to the information, and then do quality checks, and then upload them. When they’re humming, they’re processing a pallet every couple of weeks (with lots of mitigating factors).
I’ve negotiated a situation where, if money is sent in, the remaining pallets that should be scanned can just be sent along without sorting them for DLARC funds, DLARC will fund any that happen to overlap with their mission, and the rest will just be done.
That’s if money is sent in.
How much money? The number approaches hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I’m looking for both big-ticket supporters (who can mail me at jscott@archive.org) or individuals.
Here is a specialized donation link: https://archive.org/donate/?origin=jssm-dlarc
If we make less than we need to scan them all, then we’ll only scan up to where it’s paid for. I believe we can close it out, but if the interest/money isn’t there, then it isn’t there – fair enough. Browse the collection as it grows into thousands of manuals as it is and consider if you want to be part of all that. That’s definitely happened.
But what a happy ending it would be to push all these manuals through the process, and close it up. That’s why I’m popping up to talk about it, and why I hope you would consider contributing towards it, for a non-profit that deserves your support generally.