The Scanning & Preservation SIG is pleased to publish our first Progress Report. Currently, the SIG consists of Jim Salmons and the amazing Peter 'Lo-Res' Caylor with Pete stepping up to do a Herculean level of high resolution, reference-image scanning.

This report is jointly written (by my pulling exciting details from Pete's email updates to me) but with my final editing, publication, and promotion so I can more easily say how amazing Pete is.

So, let's start with Pete's bullet list of what he is up to on the scanning initiative:

• Two Softalk Apple issues scanned this week. December 1980 & January 1983. The Jan 1983 is a perfect bind so we'll probably want to rescan it when we have an issue to sacrifice, but any scan is better than no scan. [Jim: See what I'm sayin', that's the "Let's Do It!" attitude Pete brings to his heroic task! :-)]
• I'm going to pick up an external hard drive this weekend and start exporting to 600 dpi TIFF image files for Jim. I've got some stats homework to do this weekend, so the TIFF exports are perfectly timed. I'll be on the computer most of the weekend and the exports can run in the background. My rough calculations say the total Softalk collection (Apple, St.Mac & Softalk PC) will weigh in right around 1 TB. (About 13,600 pages at roughly 75MB/page for 600 dpi TIFFs.)
• I've only got one issue left in my collection to do an original scan of (Feb 1983) I'll get it done next week, then I need to rescan some of my first scans that were only at 300 dpi. There are only four or five issues like that and they were all small (late 1984 and some St.Macs).
• Then comes the slicing up the duplicate issues I have (most of 1983) and scanning them as single pages. We may not have to do this for the staple bound issues, but it's definitely needed for some of those monster issues in the glory years. The good news here is that's actually faster to do than the bound issues. My wife can help slice the pages out and the sheet feeder of the scanner will make short work of the scanning it. [Jim: Yeah, go Caylors! :-)]
• For raw numbers, we scanned exactly 300 pages this week, bringing our total to 11,764 pages done. [Jim: So utterly totally awesome. Low-Res and I know we'll be identifying a likely non-trivial bunch of pages that will have to be rescanned, but we'll be able to move forward with what we have and replace selectively as we get new archival-quality high resoltion scans. There's going to be a goodly number of perfect-bound issues sacrificed to get really good flat page scans.]
• Issues needed: Sept, Oct, Nov 1980 (watching an eBay auction that will get me two of them), Feb 1982 (have but missing cover), Softalk PC: Oct 1983, Feb -Aug 1984. (The Softalk PC ones may be harder to find since it doesn't seem to have quite as big a following as the original Softalk.) I may post to the Facebook group this weekend to see if anyone wants to donate some issues to the scanning effort. [Jim: That's a good idea especially for the PC version's issues which I have very few. I'll be checking the STAP archive collection's duplicate issues to close the gap on Pete's Hit List, but we surely welcome help with missing issues.]

Now here is what I did this week...

• Work with great folks, like Pete, to launch our first SIGs with this one being the most active thanks to Pete's amazing contribution to the project.
• Getting ready for the Museums and the Web 2014 conference next month in Balitmore. This conference is ALL ABOUT my fast-tracking my knowledge about museum informatics and the standards and best practices of digital cultural heritage preservation and presentation.
• I am reading extensively about the CIDOC-CRM -- The Conceptual Reference Model for cultural heritage digital preservation established as an ISO standard by the International Council of Museums. I'll be blogging more about this prior to the MW2014 conference.

Finally, I want to publicly thank Peter Caylor for stepping up to do such a monumental task of scanning on behalf of The Softalk Apple Project.