In my last blog I talked about The Ephemera Network… aka T.E.N.
As a result of my membership there I have uncovered a number of interesting individuals who are very deep into their hobby/collection, and others who are at various stages of growing and developing their ephemera interests.
One gentleman I recently met (in the electronic sense) is Gary Roberts of Dedham, MA. Gary specializes in a unique area of Ephemera.. early tools, trades, crafts and industries. He is also an admitted avocational purist which he says he brings along from his work ethics. The end result is a blog and a website devoted to his favorite topic… ephemera and old tools.
On Gary’s website he has both free stuff.. and of course items he is selling. Most of what he sells appears to be .pdf files of old tool catalogs and the like.. I am not sure whether he also sells on some online auction site like eBay.. but he may well do so.
The blogsite is in his words “Dyverse Musings on the Ephemera & Books of Early Trades, Crafts & Industries” and on it he posts many long and interesting articles and links. He also spends a fair amount of time reviewing other blogs that relate to his areas of interest. One article that I found interesting, and should be to all Ephemera-ites.. was his article entitled “Scanning Basics” where he talks in length about 8 sub-topics:
- Scanner
- Software
- Color, Grayscale, Black & White
- BITS
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Scanning Fingers and Wrists
- Post-Scan Processing.
- TIFF v JPEG v GIF v PNG
If you do any scanning at all – and as a collector of Ephemera its hard to believe we don’t all at one time or another – you should read this post. It’s very informative and has several Tips and Tricks.. that I for one look forward to trying.
As i continue to meet fellow enthusiasts at T.E.N., I try to give some of them a review here.. so that you too can expand your Ephemera Network. Of course if you join.. you’ll not need me to introduce you to these file folks.
I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the Encore it deserves.
About Tom Murphy
Gary is a great resource. I interviewed him for my blog about a year ago, and it is one of the more popular interview posts I’ve done. It’s nice to see him getting his due.
Tom
Somewhat belatedly, I made my way to your incredibly nice review of my blog & website. Living with my head in the oldtools arena, I tend to forget there are people out there who do not live for rust and sawdust. Becoming involved in T.E.N. is certainly opening my eyes further and encouraging me to explore further.
I’ll be doing a substantial update on Scanning 101 in the near future. As you said, it’s been a popular post and so deserving of editing. Plus, the mechanics change so rapidly, what was true last year is now out-dated.
My sincere thanks for your kind words