Saving magazines

IIRC RMC puts an annual index in the July or August issue. I get RMC by subscription, so I don't know if the hobby shop / newsstand issues have the index.

No, I meant DVD-ROM's for data. These are the same media that Microsoft now distributes all their developer software. They work like big CD-ROM's although higher density.

"just a matter of importing the data...." Well, we do this at work and it is not totally simple, especially with mixed file types. But I agree it should be easier than optically scanning 1000's of pages.

Larry

Dieter Zakas wrote:

Rick Jones wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

Alas, it is not a flatbed. Sheet-feed only with a max size of legal

The Kalmbach index is good, but it's not easy to search. If your public library has EBSCO or GALE databases available you can search Model Railroader much more easily. EBSCO goes back to 1996, Gale goes back to

JCun>>I wonder if there is an index available that

Can you describe why you think the Kalmbach index isn't easy to search? And can you describe what you would to to make it easier?

My biggest complaint was that with the graphics on a dial-up, it can take forever for the page to load. Some people in more remote areas are still stuck with a 33K connection (TG I'm not one of them!)

Jay

website URL: members.aol.com/orphantrainlocos/index.html All the world's a stage - and everybody's a critic.

Well, it would be nice to be able to do "boolean" searching. If you knew there were articles about fathers and sons and tried to enter "father and son" you'd get an error message that the word "father" isn't in the index. If you want to search for "O gauge" you can pretty much forget it. Good boolean searching with access to every word in every article is provided in commercial databases. It allows you to be very choosy about what is found.

As an information professional I'm aware of the expense of using a commercial search engine or even building a good website with web search engine. One possible alternative is to put their full pubs into a commercial database that is available through public libraries. They'd be able to specify a moratorium period before the material became available, but for many hobbyists year-old material would be valuable. The tradeoff for the publishers is the profit from selling backfile copies of the magazine versus profit from database royalties. For hobbyists the availability of technical information about current products might be the most valuable part. Since ads would be left out hobbyists might lose a great deal too.

Jeff Scherb wrote:

What graphics are you referring to? the index.mrmag.com site is almost all text. the only graphics on the site to speak of are the magazine cover thumbnail images, which only are displayed when you ask to see the list of magazines for a particular year. For keyword searching, the only graphics that get displayed are the two banner ads, everything else is text.

Could you be referring to the graphics on modelrailroader.com instead?

The index won't let you search on just as scale name (like "o gauge") because there would be too many results returned. You can use the scale name as a keyword along with any other keyword, so to see a list of all articles about steam engines in O gauge, use "O steam".

Boolean searching refers the the way search terms are combined, not to searching the entire text of the articles. The index treats multiple search terms as being combined with "and". True boolean searching would also allow using "or" and "not" predicates, among others, for example "steam and not review" would return a list of all articles about steam engines which were not reviews. The index doesn't support boolean searching other than "and" as you say. True boolean operations didn't seem to add too much value to the usefulness of the database, so that feature wasn't built into the code.

All those little icons after the article denoting "construction article", "plans", etc. The first time I logged in there it took forever to load a search result page. When I tried it a few months later it was improved, so I think there might have been a problem with those icons for each article having to load the first time. The next time I logged on, once one icon was loaded it showed up for every article. Dunno, really. I just know that now it's miles ahead of where it was when I initially tried it. Perhaps it was my web browser, upgrading from Netscape 4.1 to 7-something in the meantime. As I said, it's a mystery.

Jay

website URL: members.aol.com/orphantrainlocos/index.html All the world's a stage - and everybody's a critic.

Thanks for the info. Those icons are all < 1kb each, perhaps it was a server or network problem at the time, or maybe your browser as you suggest. Let me know if you have any other problems. jeff