Message text written by INTERNET:[email protected] Mac said:
>P.S. I'm still hoping that The British Sundial Society will release a CD (or DVD) containing all issues of the BSS Bulletin. I have a complete print set, but it's not always easy to locate an article.< You are not the only one who would like to do that, Mac ! However there are problems.... BSS do currently publish an Acrobat formatted CDROM of those Bulletins that are now out of print. However this had to be produced from scans of images of the pages rather than from the actual text since the early versions of the Bulletin were type-set rather than produced on a word processor. As a consequence it isn't possible to perform searches (boolean or word) on the data from this CD. Nonetheless this approach does allow BSS to supply all editions of the Bulletin whether or not any individual ones happen to be out of print. Of course, there is no specific date when ALL new articles came in as word processed files, so later editions too have been affected by this problem to some extent. Some were converted to 'soft' form by the printers but many of these versions were lost as we changed printers over the years. Even printers' soft copies of more recent editions are hard (and expensive) to retrieve because the printers' soft versions are usually the property of the printer under the standard terms of contract. It may, in time, be possible to perform a combined OCR and image scan of every page of every issued Bulletin but the Society cannot afford to do that at the moment. In the meantime, and courtesy of a lot of hard work by a few Members over the years, we do now have a new printed Index, it was sent free to all those who were Members in good standing at the time of publication. BSS Members who have not received one should contact the Secretary for further information. We are also currently looking at making a comprehensive Index available in searchable form on the BSS web site... In the meantime, any BSS Member wishing to obtain back copies of Bulletins or the CD mentioned above should contact Margery Lovatt in the usual way. Regards Patrick -
