Re: Henry's 55 Constellation

Posted by BH On 2008/7/4 12:46:30

Hank -

Even service manuals for today's cars, which read more like they were written by a lawyer, don't cover everything. This is why automakers have for decades, published monthly newsletters (like Packard's Service Counselor series) and periodic bulletins (like Packard's Service Technical Bulletin series).

Speaking from personal experiences, I can tell you that GM, for the past several years has been publishing all service manual and bulletin and (recall) campaign information exclusively in an electronic, paperless, format. That information is made available to dealers as a searchable database, but even that isn't 100% in its coverage.

However, what we have scanned and collected here at P'Info is strictly in JPEG format - meaning you can't do a keyword search of the pages. One would have to go back through and rescan everything using OCR which would be much, much more than duplicate work. It took plenty of Sunday afternoons for me just to scan the V8 parts book in JPEG format.

Moreover, OCR technology is not as good/simple as what the computer industry would like you to believe. Some of the software I've seen in years past had to be trained for subtle variations in printing between documents to avoid errors in intepreting the characters. Yet, even that didn't alleviate the need to proofread the resulting text, which takes a lot of time. Then, there are formatting issues of trying to get the stream of digitize information into a readable (never mind original) format. I know that it was plenty of work to do that with just a few historical performance magazine article for The Packard V8 Club website.

However, perhaps we can meet you halfway with something that I'll pick up with in your new thread on "suggestions about categorizing and website content".