On Wed, 3 Dec 2014, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Thu, 4 Dec 2014 01:42:14 -0000, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:

Has anyone else been through this process and felt better for it at the end,
or am I just going to regret doing it for years to come ... ?

Yep. I have a similar problem. Most of the "recent" manuals, which
means in the 30 years, I've recycled or sold. They're all available
in PDF form somewhere. The really old stuff, dating back to the
1960's through 1980's, I'll keep for now, as they're often difficult
to find. I've been scanning these as needed, and posting them to
various public archives. However, since there's no money in doing
this, it's a very low priority for me. Fortunately, I have an easy
way to do the scans. One of my customers has a Canon ImageRunner 5000
copier, that will do double sided scan and OCR reads to PDF very
quickly. Video of the machine in operation:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/CanonImageRunner5000.wmv

That actually describes the issue.

More recent stuff was done in digital form to begin with, so it was only a
matter of putting it online.

Older material requires scanning, and that takes time and maybe money, so
it's less likely to appear.

If it begins in digital form, the cost of putting it online is minimal.

Even the US patent office, which has all the patents online, has mere
scans of the patents up to a certain year, it being too much trouble to
turn them into text, while after that certain year, it was done
electronically anyway, so full searches can be done on those later
patents.

Michael