Maria A Hoyer\'s *By the Roman Wall*

[mcbishop]

Google aren't the only people digitizing books. In what looks suspiciously like a game of catch-up, M$ are funding the scanning of out-of-copyright books in North American libraries. One little treasure hoovered up in this furore if digitization is the delightful By the Roman Wall by Maria A Hoyer. I first encountered Ms Hoyer when writing an account of the pre-WW1 excavations at Corbridge, which she visited during her mural jaunt, but the whole thing is now online and you can flick through it (quite literally), listen to it(!), or download it to read later. Note that the PDF is not only a digital image of the page but also contains (hidden) searchable text, whilst the text file is a straightforward unedited OCR lift so full of the usual OCR errors.

Mike Bishop

[Caius Fabius]

excellent, maybe I won't have to go and buy all these old books just to read them for a few days. The library here has a new policy, if the book is not checked out for 3-4 years, they remove it from the shelves and sell it. That makes it really hard to do any research, since the whole system is on the same program, no one saves the less used books. Even some of the local universities are doing this, because they are running out of space. Finally they can all be stored on the internet.... it's about time!

[D B Campbell]

you can flick through it (quite literally), listen to it(!), or download it to read later.

Just as soon as you submit the audio file, Mike!
(But seriously ... thanks for the link.)

[mcbishop]

you can flick through it (quite literally), listen to it(!), or download it to read later.

Just as soon as you submit the audio file, Mike!
(But seriously ... thanks for the link.)

Oops, sorry, Duncan: didn't check the link, just assumed they would have the decency to have sorted it out! The Windoze version of Acrobat Reader has a Read Out Loud facility (sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking on acid...) but, although the text is searchable, it is not readoutloudable (you get a message saying 'Warning, page is blank, my fish is stuck'... although I could be wrong about that last bit; clearly the technology is not yet perfect.

Mike Bishop