German "Prisma" Journal - selected articles scans wanted

[Martin Hepperle]

(09-10-2015 06:31 PM)Jurgen Keller Wrote:  

Quote:Maybe we (German speaking Europeans) should plan on making complete copies of all PRISMA issues available in the long run like we have it for the PPC journal.
I have access to a fast scanner/photocopier, but unfortunately I gave all my PRISMAS away to other collectors about 15 years ago.

This idea popped up in several e-mail exchanges I had with different people, but in the end it was never realized due to different reasons. Maybe the time has come to make it happen!

I'm not sure if my collection of PRISMA magazines is really complete. Does anybody know for sure which was the first/last issue? I will check my copies and provide a list. I'm also willing to borrow my magazines for scanning, and help in doing the job.

In my opinion it would be great to have searchable PDFs, i.e., OCR would also be a topic.

In the sense of long term preservation it would surely be good to have digital versions of the journal available.

As a test, I would volunteer to scan, say one to three years of PRISMA issues and run them through the OCR in Adobe Acrobat.
Scanning would be at 400 DPI for non-barcode pages and 600 DPI for barcode pages. That's what I used for the Heldermann books.

The OCR will probbaly not be fully satistactory as the system would create nothing useful from the many computer listings. For the normal text, however the results should be good enough. I have never seen a configurable OCR system suitable e.g. for HP-41 or BASIC or FORTRAN listings.

In the first step I am not sure that I could invest the time to bring everything together with clickable links etc. - this seems to be more of a job for retired people with more spare time... But the digitized and crosslinked PPC journals are an inspiration.

In a second step at least the tables of contents could be copied to a separate index file for quick reference.

I would be willing to pay the return shipping for a typical parcel postage for this testing (a small parcel at 2 kg may be 2-3 years of PRISMA?). If this works out well, we could decide to do more.

Martin