Some
years ago H Jack Haden created a 390 page book describing
the Streetnames around the Stourbridge area. Long out
of print this book is frequently the most requested volume
at Stourbridge library.
There
have been many requests for the book to be reprinted. However,
at 390 pages this is prohibitively expensive so a new method
of publication was sought. The concept of publishing the
book on a CD-ROM was put forward, and accepted by the original
author and also the Society committee. I agreed to take
on the job of production.
I
looked at a number of formats, including web-based, browser-based
and even a series of pictures on a disk. Eventually, however,
there seemed to be only one option that would show the pages
as they were originally shown in the book, and allow the
reader/researcher to find a page (i.e. a street) quickly
and efficiently.
| The
original typed manuscripts were available and were used
for scanning the book. Then Adobe Acrobat was used to
stitch the pages together into one large document. The
advantages of using Acrobat were that an index can easily
be made linking the reader to the page he/she is searching,
the reader does not need to buy software to view the
book, small portions can be "copy and pasted"
into documents or printed to go into family files. |
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By
using the version of Adobe Acrobat 6 supplied with the disk
it is possible to select any area on the page, copy and
paste it into another document, see example below
Another example would be an entry from one of the names.
These images are copied to the clipboard and can be viewed,
edited and saved using any image manipulation software (such
as Paint Shop Pro, or Word).
Copy from pdf file, actual quality on
screen is higher
So, as you can see, providing the images as Adobe Acrobat
pdf files has distinct advantages.
To buy the disk costs £5.00, plus postage and packing.
Payment can be in a number of ways, by cheque using the
address on the Black Country Society website, see the "publications"
page. In the UK £1.00 will cover postage and packing,
cheques should be made payable to "The Black Country
Society".
If you are buying from outside the UK, please email
me for details of payment, I can accept Paypal and this
is the easiest method of transferring funds. UK buyers can
also use this form, but must pay the Paypal charges, please
email for information.
If you have any queries please contact me, I regret I cannot
supply images of streets, I have spent many hours creating
this CD-ROM on behalf of the society, the cost is low and
we have to recover our costs. 100 of the CDs we have produced
will be donated to schools in the Black Country for their
libraries, as well as copies to archives and public libraries.
Any profit from this disk will go towards my next project,
that of digitising the early issues of The Blackcountryman
to publish those in a similar way.
Email the web master Mick Pearson:
.
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