A Happy Ending For Some Manual Labor (And a Call for Support)
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 8:57 am
A great saga of rescue and preservation is coming towards its end, and there’s a chance to bask in the victory, and help push towards its conclusion.
I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the manuals business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, tens of thousands of unique manuals, many nowhere else.
Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort four pallets of the manuals for products related to phone number database the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are finished, except for a few stragglers. The loop has closed!
You can browse the collection of thousands of scanned manuals here:
The Manuals Plus Collection
And now, the pitch.
The company doing the digitizing does lots of digitizing for the Internet Archive. They are well-paid and legitimate professional contractors who are sent the items, and who do careful scanning to the best of the materials’ ability to provide access to the information, and then do quality checks, and then upload them. When they’re humming, they’re processing a pallet every couple of weeks (with lots of mitigating factors).
I got word in 2015 of a collection of manuals inside a business that was getting out of the manuals business, and while a lot of well-meaning people talked a good game, they wanted to cherry-pick (people getting rid of stuff hate cherry-pickers), and I drove down to show I was serious, and after a week of work with MANY volunteers and contributors, we ended up with pallets of documentation inside boxes, tens of thousands of unique manuals, many nowhere else.
Last year, a group called DLARC, doing digitizing and indexing projects around ham radio and radio technology, worked with me and the archive to sort four pallets of the manuals for products related to phone number database the history of radio/network technology, and off they went overseas to be scanned. And as of this month, the evaluated, professionally-scanned and available-to-the-world manuals are finished, except for a few stragglers. The loop has closed!
You can browse the collection of thousands of scanned manuals here:
The Manuals Plus Collection
And now, the pitch.
The company doing the digitizing does lots of digitizing for the Internet Archive. They are well-paid and legitimate professional contractors who are sent the items, and who do careful scanning to the best of the materials’ ability to provide access to the information, and then do quality checks, and then upload them. When they’re humming, they’re processing a pallet every couple of weeks (with lots of mitigating factors).