As much as I love handling a good illustrated catalogue, I think that in the case of something as ambitious as a compilation of several hundred detailed color photos of rugs CD Rom is the way to go, unless the publication is going to be alimited subscription available to the handful of well-heeled collectors who can afford it.

A catalogue (or annotated database) that would be prohibitively expensive on paper--as this would certainly be--could be "printed" very cheaply on CD Rom. I know from experience. Every year, I am responsible for putting out the US Govt's annual report on what other governments are doing to control illicit drugs(the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report to Congress.) It is a 750-plus page tome that weighs five pounds and costs us about $40 a copy in printing costs alone. We can put out the same volume for about $1.50 on CD Rom. Of course, everyone wants a paper copy, but we are gradually weaning people off them--especially when there are budgetary considerations. The other advantage of having publications/data bases on CD rom is that with a local CD rom burner we can provide finished disks ourselves to meet individual requests once a mass printing is exhausted.

Regards to all,

Ken

are there known standards for the publishing of photographic images on CD's?
pixels per cm2 . . .color compatablility . .or whatever

will these standards not look anitquated in a few years therebye wasting the work of the compilors?

is there a way to do the compilation and be able to do a technical upgrade as the technology advances? .. . some way to keep the info in very high definition [with out doing large format diapositives which are I fear very very expensive. . .actually I don;t know.

I would very much like one day to a do a compilation of one of the areas of my collection [the niche forms] and I believe that there are not all that many textiles out there within the parameters that I could define.-- perhaps a few hundred in the world--perhaps a thousand . . .but a start could be made

thanks in acvance

Richard

Most of the images you see on your computer monitor on Turkotek are around 50 kb, almost none are larger than 100 kb. A computer monitor is not a very high resolution thing.

For printed photos on glossy paper, a file size of about 600 kb is very sharp when printed at sizes up to about 4 x 6 inches, maybe even bigger. To get sharp images in 8 x 10 prints, you need image files about 1200 kb. A 1 megapixel digital camera produces an image file around 600 kb; a 2 megapixel camera image file is around 1200 kb. A single CD holds around 600,000 kb.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, but I hope it helps.

Steve Price

Although we're a little off what we started with, I'm glad this discussion is in a salon and will be captured.

Steve's info in the post above seems potentially very useful to someone considering a CD-ROM distribution.

I have an additional question for Ken Thompson, since he is working actively with CD-ROM publication (my staff is using CDs to distribute computer-based instruction but that's different).

Ken, Steve and I have been talking about search capabilities in another thread and I wonder what your experience is with setting that up in the CD-ROM publications you put out?

My guess is that some kind of "key word" strategy is employed but that can be more difficult than one might think. One has to guess frequently what a searcher might use as a key word and then use all the usual spellings of it. And I suspect that's just the surface of the design problems here.

What do you folks do for your publication?

Regards,

R. John Howe

While I have no inside information on why the National Geographic CD set's search utility is so bad, my guess is that it is because every page of the magazine is in it as an image file only. Most search utilities scan text files for keywords, but you can't do that with image files unless you first run them through optical character recognition programs (which are OK, but far from perfect, and easily fooled by things like changing fonts) that convert them to text.

If that is the cause of the problem in National Geographic, it would not be a problem with anything like a book, which would come as text files plus image files overlaid on them by, perhaps, the same system used with web pages.

Regards,

Steve Price

do exquisite books . . ..saw "flowers under foot' or 'when silk was gold'
or excellent ones like the latest ottoman cat from the washington museum or Roderick's Ottoman embroidery or the Vok catalog go through a digital phase or are they printed from analog diapositves??? and if they went through a digital phase to what quality of resolution did they reveret to?

I tried tooking at images form 'when silk was gold' with a maginfying glass and there is a wealth of information to be gotten. It seems a great waste to create a data base and then discover that nobody will want the view the information because the technology is insufficient.

Richard

Richard, I think that Steve answered your question on the CD rom capabilities much better than I ever could have. But I think that the versatility of the various resolutions and formats possible digitally make this an ideal medium for a photo database. When it is overtaken by a new storage medium, it should be easily transferrable since it will be in digital form.

John, Since we have just begun to put the publication on CD rom, we only have the "find" possibilities that are built into the three formats we have put the book into (Word, PDF and HTML). It is not much of a problem in this case, for the topics are limited (drugs and money laundering) and most of the searching is done by country name.

If this seems unsophisticated, remember that technologically the State Dept has been about as retrograde as you can get and still function. We spent so much time trying to automate quill pens--we had antique Wang systems until four years ago--that for us a CD rom publication is a miracle. The only other time we did it was for the Vice President's conference on Corruption two years ago. And that CD was distributed to many of the 130 plus governments complete with a virus.

Regards to all, Ken

I have with interest followed your postings and want to give you an update what I have been doing the last couple of months.

I November last year my whife and I participated in a wonderfull 16 days trip to Peru.

During that trip I agreed with the other participants that I would create a CD with all the best photo'es and diaries from the trip.

This has now resulted in a CD with the trip-diary in Norvegian and Danish, a jungle diary in Norvegian, 600 photo'es from the trip, maps, background material such as Ceramics, Textiles, Hotels, Museums, Flora & Fauna, Dictionary, Music - 300 photo'es of background material - all in all - a beautifull 460 Mb selfstarting CD.

What I did was creating this in MS FrontPage as if it was a website. Instead of publishing it as a website I stored them on a CD. You navigate around as you navigate on a webpage. It's only your imagination that set the limit of what you can do. Have a look at other pages, copy good ideas and very soon you are flying.

Before I started I did not know FrontPage, but I bought a cheap, small teach-it-yourself book of around 100 pages, and it did'nt take long before I could do a lot of interesting things in FrontPage.

Best regards
Soren

Steve - for future use I think you should point out when one go directly to the reply that Nickname should be filled out with your full name.

Best regards
Soren