Hello, I'm Mike Voisin, curator of the AAF Collection. Since November 2006, the Army Air Forces Collection has been a growing collection of documents from the World War II era.

These documents are generally not available on the Interent. I wanted to share them for their historical and educational value. I found many items in my late father's footlocker, in which he kept momentoes from the war. Other items were contributed by people like you. If you have similar material from your own collection, or that of your parent's or grandparent's, I hope you will consider sharing it here. Please contact me for details.

If you find the information on this website useful, please make an optional, small donation. It will help defray the cost of maintaining this website.

I hope you will consider contributing documents to the collection. It is a great way to share historical information about the Army Air Forces during World War II. If you are interested in contributing, please keep in mind:

1. Free: All documents in the collection can be viewed or downloaded free of charge. The curator may charge a small fee to anyone who requests a CD-ROM containing documents from the collection. This fee covers the cost of media and postage, but not the contents of the CD-ROM. The curator does not profit from your contribution.

2. No Compensation: You will not be compensated for submitting material. Note the curator does ask for a small donation from those who find the website useful. These are optional donations that help cover the cost of maintaining the website itself, and not the documents it contains.

3. Relevance: All documents are relevant to the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, or earlier. Material about the Air Force after World War II, or other service branches, is not the focus of this website.

4. Copyright: Copyrighted, nongovernment-published works will not be accepted. US Government material from this era is in the public domain. Your contribution will be removed from the collection upon request of any copyright holder.

Scan Your Document

If you have access to a scanner and can scan an image of each page of your document, you can send those image files to the curator. The curator will then combine your images and produce a Portable Document Format (PDF) file for this website.

Upload Your Image Files

You can upload your image files to this website using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. If you do not have an FTP program, you can find good free programs on the Internet. See for example Core FTP. The following steps assume you are using Core FTP, but they also apply to most FTP programs.

1. Contact the AAF Collection curator to make arrangements to upload your image files. The curator will supply you with a username and password to use below.

2. If you don't already have an FTP program, download and install Core FTP. Follow their instructions for doing so.

3. Run Core FTP. In the Site Manager dialog of Core FTP, click New Site to create a new remote site.

4. In the Site Name field enter: AAFCollection

5. In the Host field, enter: ftp.aafcollection.info

6. In the Username and Password fields, enter the username and password you obtained from the curator in Step 1 above.

7. Click Connect and Core FTP should connect to the FTP directory at ftp.AAFCollection.info. You can now transfer the files you wish to contribute to the collection. Drag and drop the files from your local computer (usually listed in the left side pane) to the remote site (usually listed on the right).

Here are some recommended settings and tips if you use a scanner to scan your document.

1. Choose the option for True Color mode.

2. Scan at original document size (100%). Please do not enlarge or reduce the image.

3. Choose a scan resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch). If that results in too large a file, choose 150 dpi instead.

4. Use a descreen filter if you are scanning a magazine or newspaper. This eliminates the interference pattern you might see on your scanned images. Magazine descreening is typically 133 lines per inch (lpi) while newspaper descreening is 85 lpi.

5. Scan to create a JPEG (.JPG) image file. If you can, set the JPEG quality level to 80% (better). This results in a slightly larger file, but the quality is better. An ideal format would be to create a TIFF (.TIF) image file. TIFF is a loss-less format, meaning the image can be changed and re-saved without losing image quality, as JPEG would. However TIFF files tend to be very large and the loss of quality with JPEG is not significant.

6. Number your image files consecutively. This will help the curator create a PDF document. For example, name your files page001.jpg, page002.jpg, page003.jpg, and so on.

7. Scan all pages of the document. Include blank pages, and even the inside cover pages, and the back cover. Pages can then be combined correctly into a PDF document and facing pages will continue to face each other, as in the original document.

8. Try to keep the pages of the document straight and aligned consistently while scanning. This helps the curator from having to rotate each skewed image.

9. If a page does not fit completely on your scanner, scan it in portions. The curator will either stitch the portions together to make a single page, or create several pages in place of the single large page.

10. An excellent program to view and organize image files is XnView, available for free at www.xnview.com.