Mainline Modeler digitization

[sirenwerks]

Thanks, Mr. Mauer.  Mucho appreciation.  FYI, I reached out to TrainLife about this project and have only heard crickets chirping in response.  Something tells me the site's having issues.  Good thing I also got a significant amount of RMJs and other mags featured on that site along with the MMs.

[sirenwerks]

I need some feedback on how to do this...


Currently, when I scan mags for myself I scan the cover and all pages of an article and save the doc as an article.  I haven't kept the fluff - all the ads, the table of contents, the classifieds, or the, IMO, unimportant sections like MR's Trackside Photos or product reviews, etc.  There were a lot of, IMO, unimpressive layout articles I didn't save too.  That's how I do things now and I could do it with MM collection to save some scanning time and simplify the organization.  But I'm thinking of switching up and doing cover-to-cover.  This would mean scrapping the article organization and saving each page individually.


So my question is, just how important to everyone else is the superfluous stuff I hadn't been saving in the past?

[Rasputen]

As a side note,  all of the C&O related articles have already been scanned in and are available on a DVD, from the COHS.   

[jmlaboda - RIP]

Speaking of Trainlife I did a search there about a week ago and was surprised to see that some of the magazine pages were back up so it no longer is lingering... just don't know when they will "finally" get everything back in order.

[craigolio1]

So for example when N-Scale Magazine or Model Railroader Magazine decided to offer their magazines in electronic form on a CD, they had to contact all the authors to get permission to re-publish the articles again, in electronic form?  What about the authors that had passed away?

Actually, since you seem to be quite knowledgeable in this subject, I have a question.  About 10 years ago FineScale Modeler Magazine purchased an article from me.  They paid me but never published the article (and most likely never will since the subject matter is not typical of what they publish).  Can I sell another copy of that article to another magazine which will most likely publish it (as it is in line with what they cover)?  Or can I buy back the article from Finescale Modeler?  I contacted the editor several times (email) but never received any replies.

Could you rewrite/update the article by adding material that may make it more relevant, considering its age, therefor making it new material belonging to you again?

Craig

[Mark5]

Speaking of Trainlife I did a search there about a week ago and was surprised to see that some of the magazine pages were back up so it no longer is lingering... just don't know when they will "finally" get everything back in order.

Some of the pages never went down, I wonder if that is what you saw. If a restore is under way, that would be good news!

[peteski]

Could you rewrite/update the article by adding material that may make it more relevant, considering its age, therefor making it new material belonging to you again?

Craig

Sure, but what percentage of the contents would have to be different for the article to be considered new?

[JMaurer1]

If you only scan the 'important' pages, Murphy's law says that you will eventually need something that you didn't scan.

I checked Trainlife when I posted the other day. I found that some of the magazines were back up, but the search feature is dead...blue page of death.

[jmlaboda - RIP]

Could you rewrite/update the article by adding material that may make it more relevant, considering its age, therefor making it new material belonging to you again?

You would really run into trouble with authors since it was their material that you used as the basis of a new article.  Not sure I would want to run that gauntlet...

[peteski]

You would really run into trouble with authors since it was their material that you used as the basis of a new article.  Not sure I would want to run that gauntlet...

Neah, I'm the author.  He was replying to my off-topic excursion. 

[jmlaboda - RIP]

Neah, I'm the author.  He was replying to my off-topic excursion. 

Oops... sorry...   My bad. 

[TiVoPrince]

Retirement
plans now on hold. Those MM innagural issues were a key component. Wonder how the market for Kato SD40-2 is holding up....

[Grimmis1027]

The importance of the TrainLife site as a resource keeps becoming apparent to me.  The problem is I was never quite happy with the quality of the TrainLife page images.   Not long ago I bought a practically complete collection of Mainline Modeler and some other MRR mags.  Since MM is OOP and likely never to be seen again I feel almost a responsibility to handle it properly.  My original idea was to scan the articles I want and dispose of the issues.  Now I'm thinking it should be turned into high-quality scans of each issue cover-to-cover.

  I just recently discovered this thread from a "Mainline Modeler search" thru Google, while I too have been archiving the articles that I want from each magazine into digital format.

  However, there is some issues missing or already "recycled" from my collection, recently I was scanning in articles from another magazine (Radio-Electronics) when i discovered a web site called the Internet Archive, this site has a large collection of defunct magazines that can be read or downloaded for free.

  You can also upload any missing issues you have, I have just finished making a pdf archive of an issue that they don't have and hope to have it uploaded soon...

My ability to undertake such a project on my own is questionable.  I have the organization skills and can do the scans over time, but then there's the rest.  The way I see it is each page needs to be scanned, potentially color corrected, edited to page edge, and then all the pages reassembled into a PDF or catalogued by issue/page like the TrainLife collection.  Then it's got to find a home.  With the latter, I am thinking about reaching out to TrainLife since it already has a system established.

  My articles were done by doing an image scan of each page, then assembled into a PDF, all in one step by a program called Paper Port, there was no color correction or editing of any page, oh, and i used 300 dpi for most of my scans.

  The Internet Archive wants the pdf's you upload to be high quality at 600 pdf, so I spent the past day or two scanning a magazine in, a issue I had, but one they didn't was the October 1988 issue of Radio-Electronics, I cut off the binding to separate the pages and fed 5-6 pages at a time into the document feeder of my printer for scanning, my scanner can scan both sides and more than one page at a time, i ended up with a pdf at about 485 megs in size.

  I'll be talking to the Internet Archive about uploading soon...

[ncbqguy]

I would agree that if one is going to take the trouble to scan magazines ALL pages should be recorded.  Years from now the advertisements may be important to some in the future. 
For example, I've referenced ads in MM as for brass Pendulum Cars is a good reference for the differences between the CB&Q, ATSF, and GN cars. 
Ads also can detail when products were introduced and what things in the Hobby cost (cranking prices into an inflation calculator usually shows the Hobby ain't getting any more expensive than it was "back in the day").
Be sure to get good high res full scans of the plans.  Nothing more frustrating than a scan of a folded fold- out. Plan, something common in U of M microfilm /Google Books digitizations!
Be sure to fully cite the Issue, Volume and Cover Date of each magazine using its correct Title, another failing of some academic library catalogers and digitizers.
Charlie Vlk

[sirenwerks]

The plan would be to follow LOC best practices, with a preferred 1,200 dpi image scan and file names akin to 199908_MAINLINE MODELER_ALL (for entire mag) or with an article title and author's last name add-on if just articles is the way it progresses.  I agree that advertisements can prove useful but...  The problem, as was pointed out in the post prior to yours, Charlie, is that article breakdown maintains a downloadable file size; whereas entire issue files will be monstrous.  The only reasonable workaround for the latter I can think of is doing it in a format akin to TrainLife, with pages available individually (and adding an appropriate field to the file title, like 199808_MAINLINE MODELER_P012).  (That makes me wonder if page # should correspond to real page number, with cover, etc. having a special designation...) 

Additionally, I am not keen on the idea of scanning 25+ years of magazines (more than Mainline Modeler, too) taking up too much time away from my witnessing my three-year-old's growing up, if you get my drift.  I'm already working a full-time and a part-time job (anyone interested in driving for Uber and Lyft, give me a PM) as it is, and trying to learn CAD and Arabic and teach my wife to drive on the side.  Unless I can find software that will put out accurate scans and automatically trim page sizes and straighten slightly akilter images and spit the result out into a multi-page PDF, this task will require tweaking each page by hand.  And the latter will require scanning into a photo format (TIFF most likely) to do the editing in GIMP, then transferring edited image to PDF, then combining individual page images into bulk packages (article or full issue) in PDFSam, and then getting them into a medium where folks can access them.  This is why I was inquiring whether there are parties interested in sharing the effort, since I have no plans to personally fiscally benefit from the result.