Scanning And Uploading

Scanning

Ideally, you should have access to a A3 scanner. You can use an A4 scanner for most mags, but it's harder to keep pressure on the spines to give a good scan quality, and it will take quite a bit longer.

(If the page doesn't like flat, the scan quality degrades, text becomes blurry, and the OCR becomes very difficult, meaning that it increases article proof-reading time significantly, so please pay particular attention to this as you scan.)

300dpi is the minimum quality we need to give good OCR results. If you have a fast scanner and can do 600dpi, go for it, but 300dpi is usually fine.

If you are not sure whether the quality you are scanning is good enough, you can always scan a page or two and upload them to us - we can take a look and let you know whether they are ok. You don't want to scan a whole mag only to find out you scanned them at 75dpi afterwards!

Note: We do need the magazines complete, ie every page scanned, even if there are blank pages or no useful data on them. This is important for magazine page counts and to match articles with their equivalent place in the magazine.

Sometimes there are additional pullouts or supplements with issues. If it's just an advertising brochure for a third-party product or service, then we don't need it. If it's something integral to the magazine, such as an extra supplement, a letter to readers or somesuch, then please scan it at the end of the regular magazine pages.

Saving & Naming

Please save the images in full resolution, either as tiffs, or as high quality jpegs, with one image file per page (or per two pages, if you've scanned as A3). Don't worry about straightening or other image processing stuff, and don't save as PDFs or other image formats where we have to extract the pages before adding them into the scan library.

Name them according to the issue and page number, eg "mt_8703_01.tiff" ... "mt_8703_98.tiff" then zip them up into "mt_8703.zip"

If you want us to check your files are ok, add "test" in the file name, eg mt_8703_test.zip, then we'll know what to do with it.

If using the tiff file format, typically you should see sizes of 1 to 1.5GB for a large (100-page magazine) at 300dpi. Jpeg files will be quite a bit smaller, but please keep them high quality jpegs and don't compress them too much.

Uploading

Upload the zip file to the muzines Dropbox folder here:

> Muzines Dropbox Upload

(You do not need to have a Dropbox account to upload your files)

Lastly, thank you for your efforts in helping preserve this content.

Magazines Needed - Can You Help?

Do you have any of these magazine issues?

> See all issues we need

If so, and you can donate, lend or scan them to help complete our archive, please get in touch via the Contribute page - thanks!