Had enough time over Christmas break to finish restoring, OCR’ing, and fully linking the 1905 National Electrical Code.
Remember back when we had a brief period where NFPA sold searchable PDFs with internal linking? Basically, if there was a reference to another part of the code, you could click on that reference and it would jump you immediately to that part of the document. It’s fantastically useful as an offline research tool, and we’ve upgraded the 1905 NEC to take advantage of it.
Restoration Process
The scans we were working with had varying levels of quality, in addition to the original book having a number of stamps and markings from previous owners. We did our best to remove everything that was the consequence of time, to restore the original as it was printed, as well as enhance the contrast of some of the weaker stamped pages and/or overactive noise reduction with the original scans.
There is more that could have been done with dewarping/deskewing many of the pages, but the text is now readable and formatted consistently. This is something we’ll get better at with future editions.
Some of the scans weren’t cropped at all, which posed some fun challenges.
Overall, we’re very pleased with this first outing. The next restoration will likely be the 1930 NEC, since that just hit public domain last year, and it will be fun to get the contrast of 25 years of code changes.
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