Re: REF: HIST: Iris 'Chronicles"

From: HIPSource@aol.com

In a message dated 2/11/00 4:24:08 PM Eastern Standard Time, BILLS@hsc.edu 
writes:

<<  Has consideration been given to using either an optical character reader 
or an ordinary scanner to preserve/edit old iris documents?  My scanner, by 
no means an expensive one, reads text and uses a program called TextBridge to 
make the scanned text into a document which can then be reformatted and 
edited.  While the latter steps can be tedious, the process sure beats 
laboriously retyping the whole thing. >>

As the story was received here, when the decision was made not to retype the 
Chronicles the consensus was that the original documents should be presented 
as found. The labor involved in retyping was, I'm sure, a factor, and I'm 
sure there was some consideration given to the possibility of heated 
differences of opinion on some interpretations of the murky bits, however the 
decision turned on the desirability of offerring maximum authenticity with 
minimum intervention. For instance, I believe the Sass Chronicle was found 
only as a set of gel stencils or whatever you call them, for a mimeograph 
machine. It was fragile, incomplete and had to be typed to be made available 
at all. We always have an eye out for even better copies of the originals and 
we try to offer the best quality reproductions we are able within the limits 
of our resources.

As for scanners, as I said, some Chronicles are better than others, and where 
they are illegible to the human eye I suspect they will probably be illegible 
to the scanner as well.    

However, the new technology has indeed been applied to the question of 
preserving old iris documents and making them available for study. I believe 
Mike told me that the two excerpts from the British Iris Society Bulletin 
Number 1 and the BIS Year Book 42 on the HIPS page (lower left) were derived 
from scans of the originals, as are the wonderful photographs of Grand Old 
Men on the page under Notables. 

If people have not visited the HIPS page lately it is certainly worth a trip. 
There is something for everyone there, from scientist to the merely nostalgic 
and anything in between, good articles, and a lot of pretty pictures to 
brighten the dark days of winter.

Http:///www.worldiris.com

Anner Whitehead
Commercial Source Chairman
Historic Iris Preservation Society
HIPSource@aol.com



 

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