The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.11           March 23, 1998 
 
 
Volunteers Scan Books, Print Shop Betters Maintenance  

BY BRIAN TAYLOR
NEW YORK - The project organized by San Francisco volunteers to digitize Pathfinder's backlist of books is expanding. Eight more titles have been shipped out to supporters in London, England; Greensboro, North Carolina; and around the world. This makes a total of 25 books that are being either scanned or proofread.

Some of the Pathfinder newest titles sent out include, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1932), Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom by Nelson Blackstock, and Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. These books join the process already under way to put The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party by James P. Cannon and Evelyn Reed's Sexism and Science in electronic form.

As these supporters of Pathfinder's mission - to keep the history of the modern working-class movement in print and accessible for fighters today - move forward, staff members at the Pathfinder Building here have made progress in preparing to produce the digitized books using the time saving computer- to-plate (CTP) machinery.

Pointing to the importance of keeping Pathfinder books in print, communist workers and others in the United States sold 245 books to fellow unionists last month - more than double the amount from January.

Labor-saving scanner
"Black-and-white graphics - maps, charts, photographs, illustrations - constitute hundreds of pages of Pathfinder books, which must be digitized along with book text," explained Eva Braiman, a staff member in the prepress department of Pathfinder's print shop. Pathfinder books use graphic images that enhance the books by making them more interesting, concrete, and clearer to understand. It takes great care and precision to produce these images with high quality standards.

Many of these graphics currently exist only as film negatives. Others are in a electronic format that is not up to modern standards for digital graphics. So Braiman and Pathfinder editorial staff member Michael Baumann took action to resolve this.

"We visited a company that digitizes magazines and photos for leading industries, in order to see if technology existed that could do a quality duplicate of Pathfinder book graphics," Baumann said.

By consulting with companies using CTP and attending a conference on digital book production, Baumann and Braiman learned about copy-dot scanners - high-powered image processors that digitally capture every dot from a piece of film, making a replica that loses virtually no detail or quality. "We gave them graphics that represent some of the most detailed work," Braiman said, like a battle map designed by Eric Simpson for Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War. The results were nearly perfect.

This step of production can now be done by a service that produces top quality work at a relatively inexpensive price. And those newly digitized graphics can be made available to the teams of volunteers who scan and proofread the books.

"This technology will allow us to keep in step with the volunteers who are scanning the text of Pathfinder books," Baumann explained. The many hundreds of hours that were necessary to produce the intricate maps, battle plans and photo signatures with the quality Pathfinder is known for in such books as Ernesto Che Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and Harry Villegas's Pombo, A Man's of Che's "guerrilla" can now be preserved. "In the case of photographs, negatives currently used for pictures can be damaged and will degenerate over time, but the digital files" have no expiration date and are infinitely reprintable.

Taking on long-term maintenance
The web press department staff has taken steps in the last week to upgrade maintenance. Róger Calero, who heads up the web department, explained, "Our first step was to visit other shops to learn" methods of organizing the web press from workers with many years of experience in the trade. Along these lines, they decided to overhaul the press's quarter folder. The staff brought in a professional mechanic, trained at installing this equipment, to ensure the job was done right.

"The web press is a complicated machine that takes time to be trained on," noted Paco Sánchez, who worked closely with the mechanic on the quarter folder. "A well-kept, smooth- running web machine increase productivity and reduces time necessary to train new workers. The difference in productivity after the overhaul was immediate," he said.

"We are not professional mechanics here," said Ryan Kelly who also runs the web, "so we employ the skills that other workers outside the print shop have." In addition to that step, the staff implemented a maintenance program that calls for regular attention to maintaining the cleanliness of the machine.

Keeping the web in optimum condition allows the staff to harness its full capacities, which cuts down labor and training time, makes production work more accurate with less scrap, and upholds the print shop's high standards of quality.  
 
 
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