09-06-2020, 12:35 PM
It's nice to contribute something that's genuinely new to the 'net. It's a tiny thing when you look at the fabulous World Radio History site: https://worldradiohistory.com/index.htm
When I'm at Paul Marshall's house I look at the dozens of feet of shelving full of manuals etc, mainly for TV broadcast kit, and wonder how many of them are unique. And how little of that information is available online. The BECG www.becg.tv trustees, which includes me, have thought about our aims. Apart from preserving equipment, the documentation is just as valuable. To say nothing of tacit knowledge, the stuff that isn't even written down. In an ideal world we would be scanning and OCRing all of this stuff but we simply don't have the huge number of man-hours to do it. A lot of the manuals are on large sheets, some even bigger than A1. Other stuff is in tightly bound books. Without specialist scanners and software it's all even harder. See how WRH does it here: https://worldradiohistory.com/Scanning-f...istory.htm David Gleason, the WRH man, deserves the engineering history equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
I look at the relatively small amount of stuff on my own shelves. For example I have complete paper (photo)copies of the manuals of the BBC 625 to 405 standards converters. Some of it is here: http://www.bbceng.info/ti/aco-post-1960.htm but precious little. Will I ever get round to scanning them? I very much doubt it.
The BBC has done great service by putting all its archive of Engineering Research Reports etc online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/search?Type=Publications
When I'm at Paul Marshall's house I look at the dozens of feet of shelving full of manuals etc, mainly for TV broadcast kit, and wonder how many of them are unique. And how little of that information is available online. The BECG www.becg.tv trustees, which includes me, have thought about our aims. Apart from preserving equipment, the documentation is just as valuable. To say nothing of tacit knowledge, the stuff that isn't even written down. In an ideal world we would be scanning and OCRing all of this stuff but we simply don't have the huge number of man-hours to do it. A lot of the manuals are on large sheets, some even bigger than A1. Other stuff is in tightly bound books. Without specialist scanners and software it's all even harder. See how WRH does it here: https://worldradiohistory.com/Scanning-f...istory.htm David Gleason, the WRH man, deserves the engineering history equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
I look at the relatively small amount of stuff on my own shelves. For example I have complete paper (photo)copies of the manuals of the BBC 625 to 405 standards converters. Some of it is here: http://www.bbceng.info/ti/aco-post-1960.htm but precious little. Will I ever get round to scanning them? I very much doubt it.
The BBC has done great service by putting all its archive of Engineering Research Reports etc online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/search?Type=Publications
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
