A historian is sometimes forced to read books published several decades, in some case even centuries back, in order to tease out information that is relevant. Antony Grafton, in hisThe Footnote: A Curious History has drawn attention to this rather interesting aspect of historical research. Unlike other strands of knowledge in which one can see a cumulative increase in human understanding, in historical research there is search for new quetions about the past and new ways of understanding and represrnting the past. This brings me to the subject of my blog. Recently thr Government of the state to which I have temporary affiliation, has created a Digital Library in which more than 100,000 old and rare publications have been put in public domain. Unlike Google which uses the PDF format to diditise books, this Digital Library, unfortunately, chose TIFF format. This means that each page is essentially an image and the whle book has to be viewed page by page, image by image. Downloading the text means individually saving thousands of pages and converting each page individually into readable pdf.

I wonder if any of our JoeUser bloggers can send me the instructions/ link or program by which this conversion from TIFF to pdf can be done in a few short steps. I must confess that I do not possess too sophisticated a knowledge of computers and their applications.

Help in this regard will be welcome.