As of September, 2011 there are over 20,600 documents containing
over 2.08 million pages in the archive.
Bitsavers Updates RSS
An RSS feed for bitsavers updates is available here for pdf
and here for bits
Active Mirrors
Web
bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
bitsavers.trailing-edge.com
computer-refuge.org/bitsavers
minus-zero.net
www.bighole.nl
University of Kent
textfiles.com
FTP
bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
University of Kent
Archive Indexing
Two index files at the top level of the heirarchy:
IndexByDate.txt is updated each time an indexed document is added to the archive.
Whatsnew.txt contains a name of the document, with a short description sorted by date of addition.
The PDF Document Format
Documents here are kept in a minimal subset of PDF format, just using it as a
container for lossless Group 4 fax compression (ITU-T recommendation T.6) images.
Contributions are normally post-processed by tools to put them in exactly this format,
so that all of the documents here are the same and can be burst at some point in the
future when OCR technology is mature enough to do a good job of recognition.
Documents were scanned using a Ricoh IS520 30ppm duplex production scanner from the late 90's through 2007.
Conversion to higher performance Kodak DS 2500D scanning occured in July, 2007.
The 2500D is an OEM version of the Panasonic KV-S2055 scanner.
In 2008, the Kodak was replaced by a Panasonic KV-S3065W, which
is capable of color 600dpi scanning, and has the capability to scan
sheets several feet long.
Post-processing is done using Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter
TIFF to PDF conversion is done using Eric Smith's tumble
The preferred form for any contributed text scan is as a collection of lossless
Group 4 fax compression (ITU-T recommendation T.6) images saved as TIFF
files with a minium scan resolution of 400 dpi.
Lower scan resolutions produce noticable artifacts if a page needs to be
straightened in post-processing.
Lossy compression formats, such as JPEG, should NEVER be used to save pages
of text, since the compression format destroys edge resolution and contrast
would make it difficult to OCR in the future.
Bitsavers' Toolchest
Tools used at Bitsavers for scanning and media recovery.
