Progress on Archive [Long-winded]

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Paul writes:

"I looked at some of the articles, and they are clear and easy to read.
The only disadvantage is that they are scanned graphics, rather than asci
text, and can not be copied and pasted. Also, they use a lot more memory
than asci text."

Thanks for looking at the test, Paul.

Here is something I pondered over while doing the initial scans: 

The original authors wrote their articles assuming they were going to be
printed in TAG, the Magazine.  The people Neil and Mary got reprint
permission from assumed their article would be printed in TAG, The
Magazine too.  The authors of exchange articles probably all got an
appropriate copy of TAG, The Magazine in which their article appeared as
per their particular policies.

What happens when we make a xerox copy of a particular TAG issue and sell
that as a reprint?  Is that still TAG, The Magazine?  I would say yes.  
So does the AGA Bookstore!  Why? It's a reasonable facsimile of every page
as it was originally printed, including typos, drawings, ads, etc.  As an
author, I would probably expect that the AGA would sell reprints in this
manner.

How about Microform library copies of magazines?  They do a photo/xerox of
each page of the magazine and store it STILL AS A FACSIMILE OF THE
ORIGINAL MAGAZINE in compressed media.  Seems reasonable to me.  If we had
the equipment (or desire), could we pass this off as a back-issue TAG?  I
think so.

Still following?  So what about my approach?  Scans taken literally of
each page, just like microform or xerox.  Stored in compressed form, just
like Microform, except on a CD.  For each page, the content is still
represented exactly as appeared in the original printing.  To me, this
seems legal to distribute as a back-issue archive too.

OK, so let's take it one step further.  If I were to turn all those
articles back into text (either by hand typing or OCR'ing), it's not going
to look exactly the same.  I could painstakingly try to reformat it
exactly like it was originally intended (an impossible task), or just
throw up my hands and "re-flow" the articles optimized for the web. It
seems to me that at this point, it's no longer TAG, The Magazine.  It's
some new form.  When you read Neil and Liisa's SAE article on the AGA
website, or George's Some Assembly Required on The Krib, you don't think
that you're reading it as part of TAG.  In fact, those particular articles
have had corrections applied to them, which makes even the words different
than they appeared in the magazine.

So anyway, that's my logic behind why I'm becoming enamored with the "scan
archive" approach, and why I want to distribute a CD-ROM of it as our
ultimate back issue archive.  I still am going to try and convert more
articles into text for the AGA Web Site, but for those we're going to have
to ask permission of the authors on a one-by-one basis.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com