About

From Electronen Mikroskopie Museum Nürnberg
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General

The Museum of Electron Microscopy (Elektronen Mikroskopie Museum Nürnberg G. e. V) was officially founded in 2021/2022, unifying the separate projects of the founding members, as well as their collections of documents and machines.

This Wiki is intended to be a knowledge base on the topic of Electron Microscopy, its applications, techniques and history. At current, it is sparsely filled by, mostly, the Curator of the museum, Lukas Bochtler. It aims to Preserve the history of the various companies, and their machines, as well as give new microscopists a starting point for their studies, and allow experienced microscopists to learn and teach things to those less experienced. It also intends to keep older machines in a running state by giving access to service documentation for them. The Museum is in the process of scanning the paper archive and making accessible as much as possible. Scanning and digital restoration takes time and manpower, of which the museum has only limited amounts. So of the tens of thousands of documents currently in the archive, only a small portion has been scanned and digitally restored.

The Wiki was started as a publicly editable wiki like Wikipedia, but due to Bot abuse, this has been removed, and will likely not return. However, any one who wishes to contribute can request a user account to add their information / contributions.

Note, that the wiki differs from the Museums Archive, in that not all information and documents are available, even in the publicly accessible parts of the archive, not all documents within the collection are available, since some require special clearance and permission from the manufacturer to view, or access.

Also note, that the museum is exclusively run by Volunteers, this includes the Curator and Administrations positions.

Museum Sites

There are 2 publiclly accessible websites run by the museum at this time, as well as restricted access page: 

* EM-Museum.org The main website for the Museum
* Museum Wiki The knowledgebase and Wiki about Electron Microscopy and related fields
* Arhive.EM-Museum.org Restricted Access Archive Website. Limited access on request

Additionally there is the Archive Wegpage, which is currently not publicly accessible, but will be made so, once time and manpower permits. Limited access is available on request. A publicly accessible front end for the archive site is in the works, but due to time limitations not yet implemented.

Funding

The Museum is mostly funded by Donations from Private individuals, some companies.

Scanning

Scanned documents available on this wiki are created by the Museum and made freely accessible, however we do ask that you do not distribute or sell them.

Scan Process

Scans are done by hand on a variety of Flatbed, Document Feeder, Overhead and Film scanners present in the Museums Archive. The Scanners used are:

  • Epson Expression 1640XL (VueScan)
  • Epson Perfection V700 (VueScan)
  • Epson Perfection V2480 (VueScan)
  • Canon Image Formula DR-6010 (VueScan / Scan Perfect)
  • Agfa XY-15
  • Plustek OpticBook 3600 (VueScan / Silverfast)
  • Microbox Book2Net RGB
  • Contex Large Format scanner (add model number later)

The scanners are color calibrated with Agfa Colortune and IT8 targets. The resultant Tiff Files are then processed semi automatically by means of custom built processing software running in GNU Octave, which perform color correction, gamma correction, and deskewing. Descreening of halftone prints is done mostly with Setva Descreen in Photoshop CC, via a manual selection process. A second Automatic descreen software was developed at the museum running in GNU Octave, but due to its enormous computation requirements and propensity for the machine vision components to mistake text blocks for images, it is not used much at current. Further development is needed on this. The resultant resolution from the in house descreen algorithm is superior to the setva one, but requires >20x the compute resources of the Setva in Black and white, and >100x he compute resources of the Setva in Color.

Digital Restoration

The Scanned and processed Tiff files are then further digitally restored by hand, as time permits. This includes the removal of creases, removal of dust, repair of cracked and damaged pictures, missing pieces of text (such as is the case if a hole was punched into a text block), discoloration, contamination etc..., in Adobe Photoshop CC. In this process, some missing pieces of images are (as of 2024) at time restored by means of Generative AI in Photoshop, making sure that the generated content is plausibel and matches what remains. With text, and images prior to 2024, digital restoration is done by hand, my means of copy and pasting individual letters from different parts of the document into the missing spots, and hand painting and "photoshoping" the missing pieces of images to match what they should be.

PDF Creation

The finished Tiff Files are then turned into OCR PDF files by means of Adobe Acrobat CC, and NAPS2 (if images are too large for Acrobat). They are turned into JPEG2000 image PDFs with Acrobat and JPG with NAPS2, OCR is performed, and an Index is created manually for the document if time permits. The resultant master PDF is then compressed to 300DPI for use on this Wiki and the Openly Accessible Archive. This is due to the 600dpi/800dpi master PDF being very large, and having issues being displayed on most web browsers and PDF viewers. They are accessible on request, and are mostly used internally as a reproduction backup.

History of the Wiki

This wiki was originally started as a proof of concept for a different project, and a test bed for that projects development. Since the curator wanted to create a site documenting the various models of Electron Microscopes known to him at the time, and since content was needed for the tests, this site was created and information added. This site was then added to the museum project and further information was added as time permitted. Information on this site is at times outdated compared to the current knowledge present at the museum, but it is slowly updated to meet the current state of knowledge, as time permits.

It was later planned to include not only historic information, but also a methode collection and information hub about the topic of electron and light microscopy, this has been a slow in its creation due to lack of time and manpower.

Anyone is free to contribute!

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