Thanks to Cliff Kemball, Member No. 192, and his fellow Committee members at the Guild of One Name Studies, a CD containing all past issues of The Wolfack, and its predecessor, the Relf Society Quarterly Newsletter, will soon be available. Cliff handed me a prototype disc at the 2006 Reunion and members may wish to learn what I think of it.

The Society logo, our website address, and the contents are prominently displayed on the disc which comes in a transparent plastic cover and looks very professional. The CD should play on any standard PC running Windows or Macintosh; just put it in the CD drive to automatically display thumbnails of the magazines - in my case from Issue 1 of the Newsletter to April 2005 edition of The Wolfpack: it is planned to add all 2005 and 2006 editions on the final disc. Each file is in Adobe Acrobat (or .pdf) format; a copy of this software will be on the disc or you can download a free reader from the Adobe website.

Given that early magazines were produced on a primitive dot-matrix printer, the reproduction on the disc is surprisingly good. I had no difficulty reading the typescript; for those with less than 100% visual acuity Acrobat has a magnification tool which works well. Few of the photographs are of usable quality but this is more a reflection on our printing facilities than the digitization process used to reproduce them on disc.

Acrobat enables you to copy text so you can now extract easily from the magazine for your own use - though please get the Editor's permission before publishing to a wider readership. However the real bonus is the ability to search either individual issues or across all magazines on the disc for any word or phrase. Using Acrobat's search facility, just type the phrase you seek into the box and specify whether you want to search the file you are looking at or all files on the disc. Searches of the whole disc took about a minute on my computer; individual issues could be searched in a few seconds. Unfortunately, the search is not 100% fool-proof and I found it missed several times - especially if the original print was poor. It would seldom find words in italics or in very small fonts; in one case it missed my grandfather - apparently because his name had a ? after it. Cliff is currently indexing The Wolfpack; a copy will be on the final disc and so this problem should also be eased eventually.

Page numbers in the search results refer to the Acrobat file page rather than the magazine. File names on the disc also differ slightly from the title on the cover of the actual magazine, and references within the text can also be slightly different to both of these. For example, page 6 of The Wolfpack Volume 4 Edition 3 contains a reference, undated, to Edition 3 Volume 2 page 54; on the disc this is in the file entitled The Wolfpack, 1992, Volume 2 Issue 3 and, if you open that file, is on page 14. Sounds complicated but one soon gets used to it. The situation arises not only from the use of standard file names but also because over the years we have varied the way we label our magazine and quoted references. Perhaps we as a Society need more standardization!

However, these are relatively minor quibbles and as of nothing compared to the advantages, for the first time, of having the ability to search past issues rapidly and easily. Hopefully, members will receive a free copy of the disc with the March 2007 issue of The Wolfpack. In the meantime, we should congratulate the Guild of One-name Studies on their initiative and thank Cliff Kemball for all his invaluable work on our behalf in not only producing the disc but also compiling the index. I am sure members will find both invaluable tools.

Brian R F Relf, Member No. 1

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Page last revised April 2007.