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I found a bunch of magazines from the 60s and 70s in an empty offices drawer at work and immediately thought about somehow scanning them all, so I sneakily grabbed one to take home. Since I've never done anything similar I had to go out and buy a scanner, which ended up being a HP Scanjet 3770 I got for 10€. After a little research I installed ScanTailor, a program that makes your scans a little prettier by straighening and getting rid of artefacts. I've also been recommended to use NAPS2 which has a nifty batch scanning feature.

Though taking a step back, a little about the magazine itself: "Das Elektron" was a monthly/biweekly austrian electronics magazine running from 1946 to 1977. More specifically, it featured articles about radio/audio and television technology though also about physics and spaceflight. In issue 1 of 1946 owner and editor-in-chief Hugo Kirnbauer wrote that the goal was to educate a post war austria about radio broadcasting & technology and to encourage people to build and experiment with circuits that, in the first couple of years the magazine supplied schematics for. Beginning with issue 6 in June of 1960 the magazine switched from monthly to a biweekly release.
Kirnbauer also had a radio programme from 1947 to 1997 about current news in the world of technology. He died in 2006 at the age of 87.

Back to the archiving: I have 107 issues from 1964 issue 1/2 to 1976 issue 12, I think I'm missing about 25 or 26 issues in that timeframe. The one I borrowed is issue 8/9 from 1969, which I used to figure out a good workflow for scanning and processing. As mentioned earlier, using NAPS2 to batch scan one magazine takes about half an hour. A DPI of 400 seems like a good balance of quality to speed, the old Scanjet drastically slows down if I bump up the quality to 600 DPI. The images it outputs are imported into ScanTailor and made to look nicer. The tailored images are once again imported into NAPS2 to be jammed into a PDF. One last program: PDF24 to compress, embed metadata and OCR the finished product. I'm left with a ~50MB good quality searchable PDF.

A comparison between a raw scan and one edited with ScanTailor

Deciding I was happy with how the first PDF turned out I set out to figure out who the owner was. A task that didn't turn out to be too difficult- they belonged to a retired colleagues boss in the 80s. He told me to help myself and I swiftly took the rest home, sorted and catalogued them.

As of now ^{(Oct 6)}, I have scanned all the ones released in '64. I think won't push this post to the RSS feed until im completely finished, but I will steadily update it as time goes on! You can download 1964 issue 19/20 here. Any advice or tips are appreciated!