SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Hack-a-Day reports:
[Jason Scott of Textfiles.com] found 25,000 manuals for all kinds of electronic items. The collection goes back to the '30s. Jason wants to save them and the current owner of the collection needs the space.
[...] The plan is to arrive Monday morning, along with $900 of bankers boxes [that] an anonymous donor paid for and start putting these manuals into boxes. I am then going to rent a nearby (1 mile away) Storage Unit, using a rented truck from a nearby Truck Rental place (2 miles).
The warehouse is located in Finksburg, MD, about 30 miles northwest of Baltimore.
The more people who I can get to show up to the place during the day or early evening, the better. The more people who throw money at me via paypal (jason at textfiles dot com) so I can pay the $250/month storage unit fee until the end of the year (so this can get an appropriate home), the better.
There are duplicates of some items; Scott will keep only 1 copy of each item, with the rest going into a dumpster.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday August 16 2015, @02:49PM
Make digital copies of these manuals. It's the surest way to preserve them.
That would violate copyright of course. But scan them anyway. Some of those manuals are 80 years old, and should have been out of copyright decades ago. The companies that produced them may be long gone, and finding someone who can grant permission to make copies is difficult or impossible. Unless you're Google, the only practical way a digitization project can proceed and eventually be legal is to flip the problem of finding the rights holders by making them find you. Just another example of copyright causing the loss of our science and art, when it was supposed to promote and preserve it.
To wait until copyright expires takes too long. That can be no sooner than 10 more years. 95 years after the 1930s is no earlier than 2025. But probably the people who produced the material died long after, and some could still be living, which could push the expiration of copyright out decades more. That's plenty of time for accidents to damage or destroy them. A fire at the storage facility, or mice and insects, or a flood could all do it. Or thieves could steal them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @06:48PM
Obviously waiting for a product that hasn't been invented (except in the USPTO filings of patent trolls of course). Throw the bound manual in, wait a few seconds, everything scanned and appended to disk or tape.