Archive Home >What is required to finish the AA-EVP Archive

We began the document archive soon after assuming leadership of the AA-EVP. As you can see, we finished about a third of the newsletters Sarah Estep published, but only one of the Spirit Voices. We are even struggling to keep up with the NewsJournals we have published. The problem is time. It takes time to copy the text from the scanned document files into an RTF formatted text file. We then copy that file into a web page. All of this copying, proofreading and formatting is easy but the work adds up.

We would like to find someone who is willing and able to assume leadership of the archive. There are many important documents that could eventually be included in the Archive, but looking at the time it takes for us to just keep up with the day-to-day duties of leading the AA-EVP, it may be years more before we even finish what is waiting to be added.

It is important that whoever does agree to be responsible for the Archive, that he or she is able to carry through. We have had a few false starts that have been very costly. Our interest is in the long-term support of the Archive, and it might be reasonable for you to assemble a committee to help.

All of the documents have been bulk scanned into RTF text files and TIF image files. We are formatting the newsletters as RTF text files with the intention of eventually offering the Archive on CD. We use Microsoft Word, but all good word processing applications should support RTF. That is why we are using it.

You will need a program like the Microsoft Office Document Imaging application that comes with Microsoft Office. The procedure we have been using is to search for a text string in the TIF file and then copy and paste the text to the RTF file. The TIF scan of the newsletters is good enough to read as a master, but the copy and past process introduces a few errors and the document must be proofread and formatted. After that is complete, we will take car of converting that to the online archive format.

It is possible that, if you feel comfortable with Microsoft FrontPage, you could do the conversion and uploading to the web site as well.

So, if you are interested, we would love to talk to you.

Tom and Lisa Butler
AA-EVP Directors