Old Magazines

[Jenny Emily]

Periodically I just go through my magazine stash ruthlessly and just put in the recycling the ones that I'm done with. After I built my most recent layout I had another cull. Most recent few editions of Model Rail and Hornby magazine aside, there are now only four magazines that I have persisted keeping, plus a small drawer full of odd pages of helpful articles.

 

If anyone is interested, the must-keep magazines are RM April 1999 (Whitley South dock because I love the coal staithe model), RM Fenruary 2001 (Iron Mould Lane and Nant-y-glo mine), Continental modeller November 2002 (Maria, Illinois) and Continental modeller October 2002 (Federal street).

 

Everything else I regarded as duplicating ideas, or not of interest. It was a harsh clear out. But then, I am a neatness fanatic.

[the fuzzler]

FWIW, and with complete disregard for the copyright of various magazine,I've been scanning and binning for the last couple of years.

 

it will cost you, but if you get a decent setup you can munch through quite a good pile of mags in a day.

 

I bought a fujitsu snapscan 5110c, which looks like a small inkjet printer. You put your magazine pages in at the top, and the thing feeds pages in (with very little jamming) and will scan both sides of the page as it passes through. I was dear (about ??350) but came with Adobe Acrobat 8, which then PDF's and OCR's the pages very succesfully.

 

You do need a powerful PC, and if like me, you've just built a jolly quick Intel i7 PC and stuck windows 7 on it, you'll find that you need to upgrage to Acrobat 9 (at about 100 bloody quid) cos Windows 7 doesn't like it.

 

 

Cutting the mags to fit takes a while, as does removing the staples. I invested in a really heavy duty paper guillotine, that can hold a magazine and lop the spine and staples off in one go - about ??120 via t'internet.

 

Yes it is expensive, but I've got 20 years of Rail, 7 years of Traction, 7 years of Rail Express, many Model Rails, a load of Professional Engineerings and various others to do, so the costs shoul be reasonably low per magazine.

 

But the magazines take up a lot of room, and at the end of it you'll have a DVD of fully searchable PDF's, making finding info very easy and quick.

 

And to answer a couple of points - a fully OCR'd copy of Rail takes about 35 to 45 Mb of space./ And i like to keep the adverts, as the pricing makes interesting reading

[bluebottle]

Why, when I scan a magazine page with text and colour pictures to pdf or jpeg, does the text appear distinctly blue? The pictures look okay, and the text is readable. I'm just curious to know whether this is a common effect - I've tried both a Canoscan Lide 20 and an Epson V200 with similar results, on a variety of magazines. Any thoughts? (Ihope the attachment doesn't cause any copyright problems)

 

test 10004.PDF

[Taz]

Looks perfectly black to me.

Could it be something to do with your monitor settings?

Have you tried printing a page to see what it comes out like?

[bluebottle]

Looks perfectly black to me.

Could it be something to do with your monitor settings?

Have you tried printing a page to see what it comes out like?

 

I think you've got it, Taz. A quick tinker with the monitor colour correction tools did make a difference. I suppose I really should check the calibration of the scanner and printer against each other as well, but one thing at a time. Thanks, buddy!

[tebee]

Well I'd acquired over the years a fairly complete collection of Railway Modellers going back to the early 50's together with MRN's going back to pre-war days and quite a few constructors too, as well as all the early copies of MRJ.

 

Sadly I left them stored in my mothers garage when I was moving house and had not collected them by the time she became ill and subsequently died. By the time I'd got there afterwards her landlord had emptied the garage and burned them all in the garden. He also said he burned the several boxes of trains that I had there, though I found no evidence of any train partsd in the ashes so I suspect he may have sold these. He had though tried to burn my Myford ML7 - I'm not sure why anyone would try to burn a large piece of cast iron !

 

I probably should have sued him, he could have least let me know.I did discover afterwards that the council had stopped paying here rent when she had to go into the hospice and I know she hadn't been living there for a while ( I'd been looking after her) but to do that within a few days of hearing that some one had died is a bit callous.

[Welly]

 

But the magazines take up a lot of room, and at the end of it you'll have a DVD of fully searchable PDF's, making finding info very easy and quick.

 

And to answer a couple of points - a fully OCR'd copy of Rail takes about 35 to 45 Mb of space./ And i like to keep the adverts, as the pricing makes interesting reading

 

What resolution and other settings did you use? I have bought a scanner and found that there are so many ways to scan Rail in and the search function does not yield captions in full page photographs. I use Acrobat 9.

[oggy1953]

When my mags are a few months old i leave them in the Dentist/ doctors/ hospital when i visit, spreads the word so to speak.

[the fuzzler]

Pretty much standard setting.......tell the scanner to do a duplex scan (both sides) at 300dpi, and set it to colour document. I use the scanner software to control the scan process.

 

I work in three stages. I save the files as huge multipage tifs , and do several at a time. Takes about 5 min per mag to scan.

Second stage is to open acrobat to create individual pdfs from these files. Takes about 4 mins per mag (file - create pdf from file, then document - optimize scanned pdf ).

 

That make a pdf but its not searchable. The final step is to choose document - ocr text recognition - recognise text and the file is ocr'd in about 8 mins.

 

You can also do the final stage in multiple batches, so I do lots or mags to stage 2, then stage 3 them overnight.

 

One odd thing. Using acrobat to control the scanner and do stages 2 and 3 in one go took agesx and also kept crashing. I traced it down to the fact that it doesn't like large files above 2gb (!) Which ie what the scanner produced when scanning. Windows still doesn't like it, but if I hit the limit the scanner app just closes but I also have the file saved at the print it failed. I then do two pdfs and join them in acrobat.

 

Acrobat also crashes of its own accord. By splitting the work like this it crashes much less and if it does go, I've limited the damage. Got fed up of it crashing right at the end and losing 30mins work........Grrrr !

 

Away from pc at mo. Feel free to pm if more info required.......

[Welly]

^^^

That's great! Thanks for the info! I'll give it a go that way.

 

I did use Acrobat for all 3 stages and had no problem but then I use Windows 7 and have 4GB RAM.

[Baby Deltic]

I cut the decent pages or articles out and put them in plastic sleeves in a ring binder. The rest gets binned or burnt.

[TimP]

FWIW, and with complete disregard for the copyright of various magazine,I've been scanning and binning for the last couple of years.

...

 

IANAL, but have been involved in various IP lawsuits from my working life - there are some activities that are allowed without infringing copyright to quote the copyright service website

 

Fair dealing is a term used to describe some limited activities that are allowed without infringing copyright. Briefly these are as follows:-

Research and private study

Copying parts of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or of a typographical arrangement of a published edition for the purpose of research or private study is allowed under the following conditions:

The copy is made for the purposes of research or private study.

The copy is made for non-commercial purposes.

The source of the material is acknowledged.

The person making the copy does not make copies of the material available for a number of people.

(my emphasis)

 

Copyright service website

 

Cheers

 

TimP

[zabdiel]

What I really wish some of the model railway magazines would do is to start putting their old articles on line. It works for Sound on Sound. You can access a couple of articles from the last 5 issues (they're all available if you subscribe) and anything older than that is freely available - all the way back to somewhere in the early 90s. Obviously they need to pay for the server capacity to host it, but I suspect they pay for this thought advertising and it's great advertising for them as people will link to their articles. I doubt that many people buy back issues of magazines so they're wouldn't be losing much money there. If one of the modelling magazines started doing this it would be great, even if the old articles were only available to subscribers.

 

Back to the original topic - I'm starting to cut up and file my mags, but I've not got through my small pile yet (3 years Model Rail and a few other mags). In fact I'm not even managing to read Model Rail before the next issue comes out - I've only just finished Model Rail 147 and 149 is now out...

[298]

Just to quickly close this thead from my point of view, after much deliberation I chose to sort through the collections to put to one side certain mags that have articles & photos of interest. I suppose I could have cut the articles out or scanned them, but it's still nice to sometimes sit down and read a complete magazine, when I have the time....!!

 

The rest were donated to the Electric Railway Museum in Coventry, who run a "for sale" section on their website and were happy to accept what I otherwise thought would be of little interest (individual mags and incomplete years). I have since been informed of a "magazine exchange" company in Derbyshire, but can't comment on their service.

 

http://www.payhost.net/railway/acatalog/index.html