I recently came into possession of a 350 page book entitled "The Traveling Engineers' Examination Book' said to have been written and copyrighted in 1949 by the Railway Fuel and Traveling Engineers' Association.

I can find no evidence that this organization existed after 1952 or so, nor have I been able to find a "successor-in-interest" to the organization. I have searched for a copyright registration for the book and been unsuccessful.

Thus I intend to put this fascinating book online on steamlocomotive.info. The question is, how? My immediate reaction would be to disassemble the book, scan each page at the highest definition possible, OCR it into text, and populate a series of HTML pages with that text. The idea of disassembling the book doesn't particularly disturb me, though I suspect that there are preservationists who will now burn me in effigy for suggesting it.

So...the alternative, I guess (shudder) is to type in all 354 pages, and scan the illustrations as best I can without breaking the book. I'm probably going to do this. To me, the book is fascinating, but I'm not sure I can quite justify the time and effort to produce it for the web. How much interest would there be in reading this thing?

Perhaps I should produce a couple of pages and ask people to review and comment as to the desirability of putting this thing on line.

I'm not certain, but I do believe we received a copy of this book very recently at the Md. Rail Heritage Library in a donation lot. If the book I'm thinking of is indeed this title, our copy is in quite rough shape. Again, IF we have two copies of the same book and yours is in better condition, I'd recommend trading copies so we can maintain an archival copy and, if you proceed with your plan, you break apart a worse copy.

There are still book-binding services that would be willing to re-bind your original once your scanning project is complete. It'll cost a few dollars (more like $30 or more), but it'd keep your book alive for another generation or three......

There is a successor to this group, the International Association of Railway Operating Officers. Here is the history of the group as I understand it, starting with the various names it has had:

Traveling Engineers Association

International Railway Fuel Association

Railway Fuel and Traveling Engineers Association

Railway Fuel and Operating Officers Association

International Association of Railway Operating Officers


The organization was founded in 1891 as a society and formalized into an association in 1893 under the name of Traveling Engineers Association with 109 members. Its purpose was “To improve the locomotive engine service of American railroads.” Around 1908 a similar association was started which was called the International Fuel Association and in 1936 these two associations were merged to form the Railway Fuel & Traveling Engineers Association. In 1956 the membership voted to change the name of the association and it became The Railway Fuel and Operating Officers Association and remained this until 1988 when the current title was adopted. The organization has broadened its base to include a membership of Road Foremen, Trainmasters, General Managers, Superintendents, Master Mechanics, fuel and diesel supervisors, motive repair distributors, dispatchers, research and test personnel, training managers, supervisory management of the Association of American Railroads (AAR), etc. Additionally there are Associate Members made up of various federal and state authorities and managers of supply organizations, i.e., Federal Railroad Administration, Regional Transportation Authority, Canadian Transport, EMD, GE, New York Air Brake Company, Westinghouse Air Brake Company, etc. Its present membership spans some 45 railroads in the U.S. and Canada and is truly international in scope with members from railroads in Africa, Australia, England, Japan, Mexico and South America.

Thanks for the input! I contacted them, and the gentleman with whom I spoke didn't think they held any copyrights at all. So I contacted the U.S. Copyright Office, who did a search for me, and told me that the copyright on this book expired in 1967.

So...I'm going to have someone type in the entire text of the book and get it online. Not willing to break it for scanning, I guess. After I'm done, I'll donate it to Mr. Mitchell's group. It is in excellent condition.

Doug

Well...we're going up to the lake for a long weekend, and my laptop, the book, and my reading glasses are coming along. I'm gonna see how much of this I can type in in the course of 3 or 4 days.

Regards,
Doug

Doug, perhaps a better (and less labor intensive) method would be to borrow a copystand and "photograph" each page with a digital camera. If you use something with 4-5 megapixels, even at the lowest resolution you can use the images as files for each page.

Saves the trouble of transcribing the text and scanning the images on every single page...

Just a suggestion.

You might want to take a look at this and see how these guys did a similar project with the Locomotive Cyclopedia. Nothing wrong with thinking outside the box.

http://www.xkeys.com/resources/scanproj1.php

Roger

My favorite archival copying process (without resorting to damaging a valuable book by forcing it or cutting it apart for flatbed scanning) is to photograph the pages just as Stephen says, and then if you have Microsoft PowerPoint on your computer you just paste the pages into PowerPoint slides. This will allow you to view it easily.

Then if you know somebody who has Adobe Acrobat on their computer along with Microsoft Office, you can take them the PowerPoint file and they can use the direct conversion feature to import the PowerPoint images into Adobe Acrobat without any scanning at all, and output it as a PDF file.

m.x.data

While this route may work, it will distort the quality of the image 3 seperate times - as the .jpeg format uses lossy compression which reduces the image size by removing some of its information. Powerpoint also uses compression, which will take the resolution down to about 96dpi. Adobe acrobat may further compress the image depending on your settings.

Also, powerpoint generally does not work well with large presentations - and in my experience attempting to print or show a presentation over 50mb in size requires quite a bit of memory.

The best way is to photograph the document with a camera that supports the raw format. Photographing it in .tif is good too. .jpg is an acceptable compromise but should only be done where the others are not available. In photoshop you can save the image as a photoshop .pdf and then use Acrobat to compile the images. The compiled document can then be re-printed through Acobat to reduce the overall file size (if so desired).

This process preserves a high resolution image of each page and minimizes the amount of lossy compression in the final product.

Generally, I prefer to see an image of the original than a OCR or retyped text as it leads me to wonder what was lost in the transcription.

Please feel to contact me if you need more help with this. (I used to teach people how to do this kind of stuff at the University of Michigan)

Tom Cornillie

Also wanted to mention you can use "Click to Convert" (made by Inzone) for making PDF's. It's less expensive than buying the Adobe product, a bit easier to work with, and they offer a trial version on their website.
www.clicktoconvert.com

Hope this helps.

As an academic familiar with online journal articles that are scanned from old, I prefer scanning direct to Adobe Acrobat. I say cut off the binding and scan the images on a flat bed scanner direct into Acrobat. You will get the best quality archive this way, and who cares if the binding is lost if you succeed in spreading this to a few thousand readers?

Acrobat is the current standard for libraries. Even if the Acrobat document is an image, instead of text, everybody is using this standard and all the software can work with it.

Your local university might assist you in this process.

The solution provided by softwerkslex is indeed justified, this particular book is not so rare that you cannot sacrifice a copy to handle the scanning this way.

Indeed. Over the weekend, I found a second copy of the book, and am planning to proceed with the disassembly, scanning and OCR'ing of one of the copies this week.

As to PDF's...I don't much like them as a delivery vehicle, but the good news is this: the steamlocomotive.info website is written entirely in Cold Fusion MX 7.0.1, a web authoring language, and it affords me (as a programmer) a unique capability I've never had before. I can code a single page of the book as a CF document, use that page as a template, and, on the fly, generate PDF or HTML as preferred by the visitor.

That's how we're going to do the book, so you'll have a choice to view it as a PDF, or as a series of indexed HTML pages.

The software also gives us another feature we've not had before, and that is the ability to generate any page or series of pages in a printer friendly format. What this means is that if you were to browse, say, to minnesota.cfm and then print it, instead of graphics and output being broken at the bottom of each printer page, you'd get a title page, and nice headers and footers on each page. We've already started work on this and it should become available in a few weeks.

Regards,
Doug

Information on cataloging and digitalization from the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/cataloging.html