Magazine Archiving

As you can probably tell if you've checked out my Internet Archive uploads the vast majority of my uploads are magazines. The problem is, even with the best OCR in the world, searching for a specific item is impossible at worst and very unreliable at best. It can be very frustrating knowing something is there and not being able to find it. 

BBC Micro User
(Hover for Attribution)

This, it seems, is not a unique problem to me. One of my other interests is Retro Gaming - specifically the BBC B microcomputer from the early 80's. This was my first computer and I look back on it very fondly. At the time I was using it, I used to have a subscription to Acorn User, and Micro User magazines. This suffers from the same issue. Despite some efforts to use OCR to read the text from articles, etc, there just doesn't seem to be a way to - for example - search for all the Repton game reviews, find an individual picture, get a list of software titles advertised in the magazine, etc. 

For me with the Bar Hill News, this isn't a massive problem - we only tend to go forward. But if we don't have a complete list of all the software titles on the BBC how do we know how much is missing or how much we have successfully preserved?!

All the old magazines have been scanned. Or at least I can't see any obvious gaps (or anyone crying out for missing issues). Maybe this project will identify some? Who knows.

The first step is to come up with a way of recording the content of each page of the magazine. I did a bit more digging and asked in one of the ZX Spectrum Facebook groups and was pointed at ZXDB - an open-source project hosted on GitHub. This is a lot more what I'm trying to achieve both for Bar Hill News AND for the BBC retro-gaming community. The one thing it didn't do, however, was go down to the individual components of each of the pages. That bit I still need to work on.

However, the idea of being able to offer a back-end that just includes the metadata does seem to be the way forward. Metadata shouldn't run into copyright issues in the same way that you more obviously would if the archive included copies of articles or even the games themselves.