The SBW Magazine Project was started in 2011 by club member Tom Brennan. The objective was twofold:
- To scan all of the club magazines (monthly, going back to 1931)
- To convert them to text, so that they could be searched
The first stage of the project was to scan all the pre digital magazines to PDF. This stage is almost complete, with 885 out of 888 (99.6%) of the magazines scanned and available from this site. There are still three old ones left to track down, and a few pages from random magazines missing, but the scanning process is pretty much complete.
The second stage is also well progressed. This stage has used optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the PDFs to text. Human intervention is then needed to edit and tidy the text files that are produced. OCR does only a rough job, so a fair bit of manual editing is needed to get the text corrected. This website was originally set up to allow anyone to help edit the text files, but is now being used more widely for storage of club history more generally.
One of the aims of the project was to distribute the work, and allow as many members (and even non-members!) as possible to work on it.
It takes around an hour to tidy up one issue, less for specific articles. Even if you have only a bit of free time to help out, why not give it a go. As at Jan 2022, 82.2% of the magazines have been completed.
No experience is necessary. If you can read, you can certainly help! To help out with the project, just create an account. Once you have created an account, you can pick a magazine and begin editing. See the instructions for what you need to do to correct the files.
To have a look at the work that has been done, check out the tracking page, or have a look at a completed magazine. A list of interesting articles has been started if you need a suggestion on which magazine to begin. Also see the list of editors of The Sydney Bushwalker (current as at Jan 2022).
A more recent effort has also been made to collect the digital editions of all magazines & newsletters printed in the digital age (~2009 onwards). These can be found here. The most recent ones are only available to members, via the club website.
If you have any problems in general, or with using the wiki, please drop me an email at website@ozultimate.com.