QST Archives on CDROM Out of Print?????

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W1RC:
Quote from: W1UJR on November 11, 2007, 11:00:05 AM

The entire project deserves to be done over again, either by means of Amazon's "Mechanical Turk", where users can clean up the existing scans, or just simply rescan the original magazines back into a updated format. ......

In many ways it could be argued that work of QST does not really belong to the League, as much as it does to its membership, after all, we are the League......

I'd dearly love to see the League redo this work, or if they wish to minimize capital expenditures, enter into a revenue sharing agreement and license the work to a third party to scan and then market, either in digital or hard copy form. Capitalism at work.


True enough, it theoretically belongs to the membership but the Officers and Board of Directors determine what happens with the League's property.  They hold the copyright and can assign it (or withhold it) as they see fit.

I started this thread on a mail reflector and the comments have been highly in favor of trying to get the League to relinquish control. 

Quite frankly folks, the League isn't going to expend resources to do this job properly if it doesn't generate revenue in return.  It must be profitable.  The scans were originally written to .TIFF files which are an image file.  Any re-scan would have to include OCR so the pages can be indexed.  Then a decent search engine will work properly.

Also many of the nice color pages especially the ads should be redone because some of them are works of art.

Consequently, the only way that this stuff will be improved for posterity is if we, the sub-set of the hobby that has any interest in this stuff, will have to do it ourselves.

It is true that a .pdf file can be made of TIFFs as I have done with the December 1915 issue as an experiment.  It is a huge inprovement to what exists now because it looks the same on any machine.  Still, the current scans are a lot better than the microfiche and microfilm archives we used to use to access this material.  It would be very nice to have access to this stuff online as well.

It's pretty outrageous when you think about it that this material is not already available to anyone online as it is historical in nature and important to be documented.  The way I see it, the ONLY way that this can be done is for the ARRL to place the material in the Public Domain and give us, the vintage subset of the Hobby,  permission to take charge of the Project of redoing them.

Communicate your wishes to your ARRL Director and send a copy to the Officers as well:

President
Joel Harrison, W5ZN
528 Miller Rd
Judsonia, AR 72081
w5zn@arrl.org

First Vice President:
Kay C. Craigie, N3KN
570 Brush Mountain Road
Blacksburg, VA 24060
(540) 552-3903
n3kn@arrl.org

Second Vice President:
Rick Roderick, K5UR
PO Box 1463
Little Rock, AR 72203
501-988-2527
k5ur@arrl.org

Chief Executive Officer:
David Sumner, K1ZZ
k1zz@arrl.org

Interesting that two of them are from Arkansas.  Don't take umbrage to this statement and understand why I make it.  I have a very good friend who lives in that state and has known 'em both for a LOTTA years!  He told me a funny story about one of 'em just this morning.

Seriously, I believe it's do-able but will take some effort to convince then that this is the right thing to do.

73,

MisterMike, W1RC

Steve - WB3HUZ:
Quote

The scans were originally written to .TIFF files which are an image file.  Any re-scan would have to include OCR so the pages can be indexed.  Then a decent search engine will work properly.

If the quality is sufficient, there's no reason why OCR couldn't be run on the existing image files.

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