Mining Journal

M

Martin Laverty

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I have often noted references to the Mining Journal in mining history articles, but had remarkably little success in finding out where physical copies might be found.

Then I found them online at archive.org - from 1835-2012 (including indexes), which is surely worth a note here.
 
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O gosh I can’t believe I forgot this !!!

Absolutely brilliant resource, it can be very very slow to use .

Probably due a rebuild / funding !
 
Great find. I guess everything before 1924 is out of copyright. Not sure about after, whether it goes 75years after article author's death or if it's related to publication date.

I guess we can put pre 1924 ones in our doc archive once that's up. A lot of references to MJ in the Gwydyr Books. Looking forwards to having a trawl through the journals.
 
Fantastic resource, others on the forum helped me find it when I was posting asking for help locating mining journals etc.

Some things have never changed either, the things people would send in, letters regarding missed payments or indeed saying entire quarries being scams.
 
The late George Hall had the Mining Journal bound volumes and while he was still alive I was working with him on a project to digitalise them. The methodology involved a Microsoft Access application I developed that I started to populate with George's index what he had written in the 1970s. These were all hand written in the old Woolworths excercise books, there I could not use OCR, all had to be done manually. I also started photographing the journal page by page. Each photo was given a logical file name based on Vol No and page number and they could be opened from the software application (App in chimpspeak) automatically from hyperlinks concatenated in Visual Basic. George's enthusiasm was a bit thin until I installed a computer at his home and demonstrated it running.

I only got so far with it.

It was obviosly designed to be distributed as a Retail Packaged Product to run on either single computer or local network. The package would include a runtime version of Microsoft Access distributed under my licence from MS.

The photos show part of George's hand written index, and a screen grab of part of my VB source code. This is possibly 1%, its massive code base. What this complete script does is parse a recordset extracting values and concatenating them to a text string so as to print out a "flat file" obtained from multiple records.


sample_GH.jpgVBscreengrab.jpg
 
I note that years 1860, 1886 - 1893 and 1897 - 1950 are missing from the list on archive.org

If anyone has digital copies of these years they would be willing to share I would be pleased to hear from you! (I have most of the rest)
 
Did anyone manage to get a copy or partial copy of these before the Internet Archive went down the toilet? Think we need to hold a copy (of the out of copyright ones) sooner than later.
 
BertyBasset said:
Did anyone manage to get a copy or partial copy of these before the Internet Archive went down the toilet? Think we need to hold a copy (of the out of copyright ones) sooner than later.
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I shall speak to a mate about this … I am having fears about the bgs map archive ??
 
Once our database is live , i wonder if we could store a copy of these ?
 
Once our database is live , I wonder if we could store a copy of these ?
 
I would be happy to give our trust all my source code, if it could be made use of. I dont regard it as being made absolutely redundant by the existing Internet resource, there is also the possibility of it being used to link to other material other than the Mining Journal. It would require modification though as originally designed to run on Local Area network or single PC.
 
Problem is the MJ seems to be about 500G - or of that order anyway, so we can't do anything at the moment, unless we restrict years, or it's compressable. It's worth taking a copy of in any case, anyone with a NAS. I'll have a look over the next few days - I've got a few days off work this week.

Hi @Royfellows What have you got? Software/docs/data or combination? May well be some useful stuff in there, which I'm sure could be re-worked into mysql/php/web if need be.


Robin
 
BertyBasset said:
Problem is the MJ seems to be about 500G - or of that order anyway, so we can't do anything at the moment, unless we restrict years, or it's compressable. It's worth taking a copy of in any case, anyone with a NAS. I'll have a look over the next few days - I've got a few days off work this week.

Hi @Royfellows What have you got? Software/docs/data or combination? May well be some useful stuff in there, which I'm sure could be re-worked into mysql/php/web if need be.


Robin
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Have a look , I know after beeing with Chris other day ,we are basically ready to “launch” the charity .

So if it’s funding we need to store such data ? I dunno not an area I truly understand.

@ChrisJC
 
We're going to launch docs & photos on this platform first in any case with 10G allocated to both (which is enough to get a good feel of the functionality), so there's no cost to that. We can then add storage as and when.

I see the archive has gone again...
 
BertyBasset said:
Hi @Royfellows What have you got? Software/docs/data or combination? May well be some useful stuff in there, which I'm sure could be re-worked into mysql/php/web if need be.


Robin
Click to expand...
I have the source code as described, I have copies of the late George Halls index, but this excludes Shropshire and South Wales which he did seperately. I also have good images of the MJ itself up to 1854.
If one reads Robinson Crusoe there is a paragraph about the folly of commencing a task for which there is no chance at all of its ever reaching completion. In the book I beleve it relates to a large dug out boat, in my case it relates to digitalising the Mining Journal.
 
We could put the indices to use immediately in the existing mine database system - as refs in the Publications section, or as links to the relevant Archive org documents. Would just need to correlate index entries against our mine id.
 
By way, I should have said, its VBA, but should have been obvious as soon as I mention MS Access. LOL
 
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