Goodness me, has it really been that long since I had something worthwhile to blog about?

Of course not, but I have been slack with adding entries. Obviously nobody that cares is reading this or they would have sent me an email to find out what was happening.

I spent the day in the National Library of Australia with my laptop and a scanner. This turned out to be a lot simpler than I had imagined it would be. If you can't photocopy more than 10% of an item within a library without getting into hot water with regards to copyright, then I expected that bringing in my own scanner would cause some questions to be asked at the very least.

Thankfully there were none. The security guard and the information desk were most helpful with assistance to acheive my objective.

Bill Mertens (Call APPLE) put a call out to Australians to assist with finding issues of the Australian Apple Review magazine. His vision is to scan every issue and make them available on the internet. He was missing a few issues.

I have a fair number myself, but between us we were still missing 5. Mostly in the first year of publication.

This is where the NLA comes in. One of their mandates is to collect all material published within Australia. The AAR does appear in their catalogue. Interestingly enough, they were missing a few issues themselves.

I set up my laptop and scanner in a corner of the main reading room, requested Volume 1 of AAR to be retrieved from the stack, and setup wireless access so I could participate in the A2Central chatroom while I worked.

Thankfully AAR was located onsite and it arrived quickly.

Unfortunately all the issues that they had in Vols 1 & 2 were bound into a larger book. This makes scanning a bit more difficult. My scanner has a lid that cannot be completely removed. The impact was that every second page had to be scanned upside down. I'm now looking for software that can manipulate a whole directory of JPGs without me having to do them manually. If you know of something that can do that, please let me know!

Each issue has around 30 pages. There were 5 issues that I needed to scan to fill the holes that Bill and I have in the complete set. This took me 5 hours to accomplish. Along the way I read a couple of interesting articles about Apple clones and early music synths that connected to the Apple.

I've yet to post process them into one document for publication on the web but expect that this will happen during an upcoming Downunder Chat.

Hope that you appreciate the effort!