During a trip to the MJ offices a couple of years ago to research back
issues I was told that they'd looked into scanning in the whole oeuvre
using OCR to give searchable text. Unfortunately, the error-rate (5% or
so I think) proved to be so high that it would have taken an army of
proof readers to sort it out after scanning. The next best thing would
be scanning the pages as graphics and indexing the headings, authors,
and subjects as text. They were considering doing this, the aim being a
set of CD's covering all the back issues and supplements that would
retail at about 500 quid. I guess they had mining companies and
libraries in mind rather than the lone researcher or mining historian.
Still, it would've been far more useful and much cheaper than Palmer's
CD Index to the Times (L4,000 and just the headings), though much more
expensive than the whole 1881 Census of Great Britain (available on 25
CDs for $33 from the Mormon Church).
I've not been in touch with MJ for a while, so I can't give an update on
these ideas. It's a pity the subject of family history isn't given more
credence here - perhaps we could otherwise persuade the Church of Latter
Day Saints to input the MJ...
Mick
> The original issue however still exists; should we preserve and make
>the hardware of mining history more accessible to many or make the
>documentation accessible to the few who have an interest in it?!!
Surely, the documentation is one of the major keys to making the
"hardware" accessible?? "The few" could then more easily make their
contribution to the greater good. Perhaps more people could be persuaded
to join "the few" if they realised what an amazingly useful resource was
out there in the literature.
>> [As their computers were not equipped with English-language spell-checkers,
>> they avoided problems like the one we once had on Mining Magazine, where,
>> in describing the ore deposit at Rammelsberg, a colleague wrote that one
>> series of rocks lay "unconformably" on underlying strata, and the printer's
>> spellchecker changed this to "uncomfortably", which is what appeared in the
>> published version].
I've never known a spell-checker do this automatically; there's
inevitably a liveware element (usually a finger) involved somewhere
along the line. And there used to be a thing called proof-reading that
was intended to spot such problems. Still, if operators used more of
their brains we'd lose errors like "uncomfortably" (which is rather
nice) or my favourite: "compulsive competitive tendering" (which seems
rather more accurate than the intended "compulsory competitive
tendering").
--
Michael P. Cooper * Mineralist * [log in to unmask]
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