Re:Progress on Archive

[krombhol@teclink.net (Paul Krombholz)]

Erik wrote:
>.....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.
>

An article available on the internet in text format seems to me to be in a
more "available" format that can be copied, pasted and modified easily by
other people who can take chunks of it and send them to friends or
incorporate them in other articles, hopefully giving credit to the original
author.  I think a text format article is the intellectual property of the
author and of TAG just as much as a graphics format article or any other
kind of photocopy.    With the articles in graphics format, the same things
can be done; it just takes a little more work.  One has to retype the
passages he or she wants to use.  Erik, Will you be asking permission of
authors primarily to get their permission for modifications of their work
that will be done in order to post it, or is it primarily to get their
permission to have their work in a more available, down-loadable, form?

Paul Krombholz, central Mississippi, where the tropical air has taken a
leave of absence, drier air has moved in, giving us a break from the daily
rains.  The frogs are resting from recent ogries.