About the Project

Motivation

This facsimile came about in the persuit of references for my book, A Guide to the Stick Insects of Australia. While only three pages are directly relevant, there was the opportunity to copy the whole book, and as the books get older the opportunities are vanishing for all researchers.

Audience

This facsimile will be of interest to researchers working on the types and first descriptions of the species described.

Please Copy This Disc

In the true spirit of scientific research, you are allowed to copy this disc. You are encouraged to give copies to other entomologists, both professional and amateur.

See the copyright notice for the details.

How you can help

The photocopier was not kind to Westwood's beautiful illustrations. If you have access to both an original of Westwood 1874 and a color scanner, high resolution (better than 300dpi) colour scans of the plates would be a welcome addition to this disc. I only had access to a B&W photocopier.

If you OCR any of these pages (OCR is the process of turning pictures of the pages into text documents containing the page text) or you copy-type these pages, you are encouraged to e-mail them back to Peter Miller so that they may be included in future versions of this disc.

For an example, see the pages on Phasmidæ. Compare the text with the original page images.

When and How

This project consumed about 2 hours of photocopying (20 seconds per page), 13 hours of scanning (3 minutes per page) and 80 hours of post-processing (18 minutes per page) between Fri 14-Feb-2003 and Wed 26-Mar-2003.

It could be expected that OCR and proofreading and corrections would add an additional 40 minutes per page (an additional 132 hours) at least. To date, this has only been done for 2 pages.

A careful record has been kept of all post-processing on this project.

Why not a web site?

The CD-Rom is about 100MB in size. While this is modest compared to today's hard disks, it is huge compared to the space most ISPs will provide for little or no fee.

Ideally, such a web site would also provide the ISO disc image, so that researchers (those with a broadband connection) could download and burn their own copy of the CD-Rom. This increases the space required to 200MB.

If your institution would like to host such a web site, please contact Peter Miller to arrange permission.

Lessons Learned

It always takes longer than you think it will.
Always clean the glass of your photocopier with a lint-free cloth, every ten or twenty pages.
Try to do the photocopying immediately after the copier has been serviced.
Always clean the glass of your scanner with a lint-free cloth, every ten or twenty pages.
If you have access to the book for enough hours, and the book's spine is in good enough condition, scan the book directly rather than use an intermediate photocopy.

This page was last changed 15-Sep-2003.