I first noticed that the SJAA's Fiftieth anniversary was coming up about two years ago. What could we do to recognize such an important occasion? I have been a member of the club since 1989. Ever since I have joined, when the Ephemeris came in the mail, I dropped everything to read the issue. We have been very fortunate to have many excellent editors of the newsletter and many members who have described their projects which has kept the newsletter a central focus of the club. I decided that the best present of all would be to allow our current members to read these great old issues by putting them on a CD Rom.
This has not been to easy a task. First of all, Jim Van Nuland has collected as many copies of the Ephemeris as he could. Back in 1975, a call was made in the newsletter for copies of old issues which he photocopied when he worked for IBM. We now have every issue solid back to 1975, and spotty coverage back to 1970. We also recovered an old SJAA scrapbook, which documented the first three years of the club, and included some board meeting notes and newspaper clippings to 1968.
Move forward to 2004. At work, I had access to a Canon Document Scanner, which allowed easy scanning with a page feeder at 300 dpi. The native format for the scanner is a multipage TIFF format. That format is not too compatible with many computer platforms, so I decided to convert all the files to PDF. Adobe's PDF format allows users to have complete control over the viewing and printing of the document. Another advantage is that almost every platform has a PDF reader integrated with a web viewer, so I could use web pages to navigate and view the scans. From there it was a massive clean up job. I needed to remove staple marks, mailing labels, ditto run overs, and a few "Jim Van Doodles". Occasionally, the issues were printed in a booklet form so I needed to reorder the sheets from the scans. Color paper never seems to scan cleanly, so I have used a few tools from Paintshop Pro to clean up the noise.
This is the first issue of this disk to be presented at the 50th Anniversary Celebration at the December General Meeting of the Club in 2004. Over the next year, I would like to continue this effort by doing an Optical Character Recognition of all the issues, possibly putting them all on the web for indexing, or getting them added to NASA's ADS database. The format of the disk allows us to add the web pages just like the current issues of the Ephemeris on the web. Please let me know if you would be willing to help continue this effort. Over the next year, I would like to collect your memories. What was your favorite meeting or Event? What makes you proud to say you are a member of our organization? Do you have any pictures of past events? We can scan those also to be included with the next issues of this disk Also, if there are any problems with the disk, let me know what the problem is and which platform/browser you are using.
Enjoy this disk!
Mike Koop
President
San Jose Astronomical Association
Email: koopm@best.com
Copyright © 2004 San Jose Astronomical
Association
and the respective authors.