Pat Warren -Iapi Oaye

[Pat Warren]

On 7 Jan 2004, Louis Garcia wrote:
>
> Pat:
> How can I see the rest of the Iapi Oaye newspaper?
> I was able to open the four examples from 1871.
> Louie

Louie and others,

You can give me your address and I'll send you the four cds. And I realized
I can fit the images from all the other public domain Dakota sources I've
scanned onto one cd, so I'll send that too. Only Iapi Oaye has a web page
interface now, the others are just images sitting in folders waiting for me
to give them back their web pages. And again, the Iapi Oaye web pages only
work in Internet Explorer 6.0, so look under "Help > About Internet
Explorer" to check your "Version". Not that it's hard to find a computer
with IE these days. Actually I'm going for a rescheduled meeting this
afternoon at the Minnesota Historical Society because last time I went down
there to show them the cds they only had IE 5.5 on all their computers and
nothing worked. That was a good lesson for me. But hopefully working with
them I can eventually digitize archival materials for them (what archives
has enough people or funding to do that now? MHS has a $50,000 scanner that
nobody uses!) and come out with much better quality for Iapi Oaye from
originals than I got from microform. And hopefully they'd want to host
digital versions of their own holdings on their own website for everyone's
benefit. In the meantime, though, this is a pretty fancy thing. I think
these cds are the most complete collection out there for Iapi Oaye. Neither
the fiche or film versions I used to piece it together were complete, but
complemented each other, leaving out fewer than ten missing pages from
3,100. Actually, the catalog listing at institutions that have the
microfiche version don't even mention that it's missing 1916-1924! I'm sure
nobody ever checked. And that microfiche version was done by a commcercial
transfer company, who apparently didn't tell their customer they were
missing 358 images. But they did at least film a note that said "issues
missing".

If anyone is interested in hosting the files online I'd be thrilled. It'd
be much easier for everyone to burn their own cds or save them on their
hard drive. The files take up about 2.5GB. There's also another GB of other
public domain materials, plus a couple of GB of Ojibwe public domain
materials that anyone could put online, and the web pages for all those
will soon be available. Eventually I hope to negotiate a multi-institution
mirrored site online for the materials. But that's a couple years off. I
have a lot more parts of the project to have fully functional before I
propose that, so people can see the scope of what this is going to be.

Pat