The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

I guess nothing important happened before then.

Yeah, maybe them getting on teh inturwebz??

Be a little difficult to get data on the internet before you were actually publishing it there.

I'd hate to be the person to have to transcribe all the analog prints to digital.

Most likely everything in the archives was done with indesign, or previously, pagemaker. I'm guessing 1988 and before they relied on manual printing processes as graphic layout software was almost unheard of. (This is the Windows 1.x era which was worse than Vista)

Yeah, I'm sure they were still doing paste-up in '88, '89. And InDesign hasn't been out *really* all that long (in the grand scheme of things)...they probably were using Pagemaker then Quark.

Has anyone suggested outsourcing to a small asian country with questionable child labor laws and a scanner?

You should be able to go much further back on microfiche or microfilm at the World office or library.

Yeah, that's the plan. Silly me....I thought maybe they would have scanned in older editions.

'Scanning in' as you put does any number of things.  If you 'scan in', you can't search (images can't be searched for letters/words).  You can attempt to scan in and use OCR (that's optical character recognition) to transcribe.  The problem is that is labor intensive (most OCR software has a hard time handling the columned format of newspapers, therefore requiring a LOT of editing) and the justification would be next to nil.

Plus, putting the fiche library online consumes a LOT of bandwidth, especially if in image format.  Bandwidth isn't free.

Hoss. You render me speechless.

I've been told I have that effect on people.

Whether or not it's a good thing, the jury is out on...

If they figured there was enough demand to justify the payback, they'd upload older archives. I don't think it would ever be lucrative enough for the World but a paper like the NYT, LA Times, or Chicago Trib could generate pretty good revenue from it I would think.

I did a lot of voice and data cabling at Penn Well in the mid 90's (93 thru 96) and they were just starting to use Apple applications for layout and design, a lot of it was paste-up.

Yes, I was at NPC up through '89. They were still doing paste-ups and shooting film from them. In fact, that is why I left. Unable to convince them that the digital age had arrived, I bought a Mac computer, scanner and some Pagemaker, then Quark, software to produce ads camera ready for my clients who were unhappy with the newspaper's production.

When I was responsible for 5 pages of camera ready ads in one issue, they took notice and began the change.

At least it's free. That's a rarity These days