[GreenKeys] RTTY picture tapes

[Roy Morgan]

At 11:08 AM 1/15/02 -0500, you wrote:
>I see that we have a discussion going on about RTTY picture tapes!!! ... I 
>have a collection of about 1350 tapes ...the original files were on 8-inch
>floppy disks on our old computers. ... I could xerox what I have.


John,

I just discovered this message from you that I had not read..  I don't know 
if you solved the catalog problem or not but here are my ideas:

1) there ARE people who can read those old floppy disks.  You just need to 
find someone and talk him into doing it. Then you'd have the task of 
decoding the resulting files.  This may not be all that difficult.

2) You could scan the original paper catalog pages and then OCR the images. 
This would likely need some or a lot of editing but it would take the bulk 
of the work out of re-typing it all.

3) If the tapes have titles on them, you could play the front of each tape 
and make a file of the titles with additional data that might be 
there.  This would be tedious and time consuming but might be workable.

4) You could find any and all other digitized catalogs of tapes (I have 175 
or so here) and compare what you have on paper with the sum of all those 
other data sets.. Assuming many of your tapes would appear on the lists 
from other places, this would reduce the number of new entries you'd need 
to make.

I have a simple database I used to record the tapes here.  That could 
certainly be improved for use by other people.  It runs on Microsoft Access 
but could be converted to other formats (such as spreadsheet format) if needed.

I have some experinece with databases and data transformation, and there 
are folks around me who REALLY know what they are doing.. And I'm 
interested in this project.  Let me know what happened after your posting 
and if you ever made any progress.

I am away from emails through this Saturday, so if you reply and I don't 
respond that is why.

Roy

- Roy Morgan, K1LKY since 1959 - Keep 'em Glowing!
7130 Panorama Drive, Derwood MD 20855
Home: 301-330-8828 Work: Voice: 301-975-3254,  Fax: 301-948-6213
roy.morgan@nist.gov --