Toolemera Blog

Shavings

Today's post will be brief and to the point. The newsletter of the Early American Industries Association is known as Shavings. For years it was a print newsletter, mailed four times a year to membership. This past year saw the conversion to a digital format, eShavings (we worked a long time at coming up with that catchy title!). Shavings still goes out in a print copy, but we are encouraging membership to move over to the PDF version to save trees and to save printing and postage costs. Plus, eShavings is full of active links and all sorts of pretty color pictures.

A poorly kept secret is that eShavings is available from the EAIA website to anyone who wants to download it. And that is why I am haranguing you today. If you are a member of the EAIA and have not yet opted out of the paper version in favor of the electronic version, please give it some thought. I realize that some people (myself included) like the feel of paper in the hand. Just think about it, ok?

If you are not an EAIA member, take a look at what you are missing by reading the new issue of eShavings. You can also head directly to the EAIA website and check out back issues of eShavings.

Harangue ended.
Gary

Marketing the Chronicle DVD

Folks, for the next few minutes, please do not answer your phone, your email, or that question from the annoying co-worker peeking over your cubicle to see what you are doing.

If you read my blog or visit the website, you must know the Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association DVD is on the market. If you don't know of the DVD, and you have even a passing interest in tools, trades, industries, history, &c, &c, then you really should know of it. Which brings us to the point of this post: Marketing the Chronicle DVD.

We'ld like to hear from you. Do you know of an organization that publishes a newsletter, journal or mailing list that would be interested in knowing of the digital Chronicle? Do you have a favorite hobby magazine whose readers might be interested (a magazine whose ad rates are affordable... non-profit organizations are not on the TARP list)? Do you have any other ideas for marketing the DVD?

Do you have a website or blog that can use a nifty Paypal button? We have the code for a simple Paypal button for purchasing the Chronicle DVD. You can see it in action here, which is the same as it was when you first clicked on the Chronicle link in the second paragraph. Take a look in the side bar to see what the button looks like (but without the border, that's my addition for my website). You can see it's compact and to the point, courtesy of Jim Esten's work.

What do you get in return for recommending a journal, newsletter, magazine or for hosting a Chronicle Paypal Button? Lots of good karma and the opportunity to help the EAIA. You don't have to be an EAIA member, although if you are not, you really should be.

Drop me a line or comment on this blog. If you are interested in the Paypal button, I'll be in touch with you to discuss how to get it installed (really easy, it's just a bunch of packaged markup code).

Till next
Gary

With Chronicle you get blintzes

Actually, you don't. But if I could still eat blintz, I would. Now for a Mea Culpa... The long wait for the Chronicle DVD is largely my fault. I wanted a certain look and features that would allow the disk to operate on both Windows and Mac systems. Linux even. Plus I wanted there to be a good balance between the graphics and text. And fast search. And a good navigation scheme. And blintz...

All without breaking the bank. Sure, all this could have been done with ease if money was no object. Digitizing and prepping material for a DVD is usually an exponential activity. The more features you add, the higher the price climbs.

Toby wanted a production that would showcase the association, do right by the years of work that went into the journal and prove to the Board that we actually know what we are doing. I somehow had these visions of the Board sending Toby on a long walk off a short plank from his sailing vessel, somewhere out in the harbor above the schools of ravening... well, I don't think there is much in the way of ravening anything in that harbor. Seals? Coupla sand sharks? Porgies?

Patty wanted the Amaray case and the DVD label to look attractive, tell a story and also trumpet the Association. Jennifer from the replication service wanted to do a good job by us as this was the first imaging job of this kind that they had taken on. Imaging 70 year old journals is different from imaging a PR package for DVD production.

There where the typical fits and starts. I tried to run Acrobat Clearscan with the idea of producing nice small files with full OCR. That was a pitiful trial. Seems Clearscan, while doing a nice job of mapping out the characters also has a habit of blanking out whatever it can't figure out. Not a good thing by any means. My thanks to our team of volunteers who stepped forward to help out in processing the 4 odd Gb's of images into PDF docs. Too bad Clearscan was a flop.

Then there were the problems with image variability, even within an issue. The Association couldn't seem to decide on a format, font, heading, page size or even paper. There are so many changes that getting a set of images that held together as a cohesive entity was a minor challenge. Thanks to the power of my Mac Pro tower, running trials in Graphic Converter, Photoshop Elements and Acrobat proved easy enough. Set the parameters, hit the button and go do something else (unlike at work... when I try this the Windows machines always crash on me).

If anyone says digital imaging is a science... Bupkis! It's trial and error, a certain part of luck and a whole lot of tickling the product towards what you think it should be. And then hitting the button and hoping the end result looks as it should look, at least as it is supposed to look inside your head.

To make a long, rambling tale short, this is what you will get:

1. 1933 through 2008, arranged by volumes. The early years have a peculiar arrangement of volumes and issues but the later years fall nicely into the classic four issues per volume. Thankfully.

2. A pdf containing all of the special inserts offered by the Association over the years.

3. A fully searchable DVD. You can search from within a volume or search the entire DVD from the Home page. I installed an indexed catalog of the entire disk so that searching 3.78 Gb's of files is a snap.

4. Copies of the latest indexes by Author, Subject and Book Reviews.

5. Bookmarks galore.Each and every volume is bookmarked by issues, the Inserts are bookmarked by the item title, the Indexes are bookmarked by the alphabet.

6. Cross navigation. You can jump back to the Home page that contains the Full Disk Search as well as links to all the volumes.

7. Copies of the most recent install files for Adobe Reader 8 and 9 for Windows and Macintosh. Just drag the file to your desktop and install away. Those file have become large in recent years. Rather than expect people on dialups or other slow connections to wait through dinner while the file downloads, we're giving you what you need.

8. BE WARNED! The full disk features and many of the bookmark features will only work with Adobe Reader 8 or 9. You might get by with Reader 7 but you won't have a much fun.

9. And of course you get a disk which should work on most any platform and for years. Vista or not. No fancy HTML navigation gewgaws that will go out of fashion the next time Microsoft decides to challenge the world with another operating system. Just plain old dependable Acrobat Reader.

I have seen the check disk and it is good. I'ld be inclined to sit down and actually read it from the beginning, but honestly, I have to take a short break from looking at those pages. Just for a while. I'm having dreams of fonts and halftones and resolution...

The confluence of the Early American Industries Association and the Digital Era is at hand. Take part in the festivities or be very unhappy.

Till next, Gary

EAIA Chronicle Teaser

So far, the whole EAIA Chronicle digitization project (I really think that word 'digitization' has to go the way of the Dodo bird. It's too much of a tongue twister) has been a not very closely guarded secret. Or maybe not a secret at all.

But what will you get and what will it look like? Here is a preview of the cover of the DVD case...

And here is what the Introduction AKA "Start Here" page looks like...

Please don't drool on your keyboard as that will short it out.

Till next, Gary

PS: We threw in the 2008 issues 1-4 as they were ready as the DVD went to press. You'll get 1933-2008 on the disk just for good measure.

Search & The Chronicle

One of the major requests has been a comprehensive search feature for the upcoming Chronicle DVD. There are disk search options out there, but most are expensive or if affordable, slim on features.

Quite literally at the last moment, I realized that a full search could be added to the DVD by bending Acrobat features to our needs. Index & Catalog is a little used feature of Acrobat Pro. In older versions, I had found that once security was added, indexing was disabled or did not perform well. But not for Acrobat 8 and 9. We've added a few nifty features to the very soon to be released DVD:

1. Full disk search & search by decade.
2. Auto-launch for Windows (but not for Macintosh. Of course, Mac users don't need to be hand-fed their stuff... we already know what to do.)
3. Auto-launch will open a PDF that contains introductory material as well as a set of links to all the needed features: Reader install files; Full Disk Search; Search by Decade; Chronicle Indexes by Author, Subject and Book Reviews; Volume links.
4. Each PDF will carry Return to Home links for easy navigation back to the Search and Index pages.

The final DVD is just able to fit on a standard DVD. I plan on exhaling when making the master copy just to make sure it fits.

Till next, Gary