[78-L] "The Gramophone" 90 years of issues are now "on line...."

[Alan Bunting]

I have subscribed to the new Gramophone Digital Magazine/Archive and think that it is excellent.  At just over 70 pence a week (about 1 US Dollar) it represents, in my opinion, very good value for money - it's certainly not a "premium price".  And, of course, you also get the latest digital edition of Gramophone each month.  Far too many of us these days expect everything on the WEB to come for nothing.  Haymarket must have spent many thousands of pounds getting this up and running and, lets face it, they are a business, not a philanthropic organisation.

The improvements on the original archive are immense - the new scans are of very high quality and can be printed out directly in .pdf format, or you can cut and paste extracts into Word or similar documents . The search engine works very efficiently and can take you either to the paragraphs your search topic is in or the whole pages they are on.  Some subscribers have complained that the June 1957 to May 1958 editions omit the advertising - this is unfortunate but there are still 988 editions that are complete which should satisfy most people. 
 
The only problem I had was actually making the thing work on my PC after I had paid up. The instructions  they e-mail when you subscribe are, to say the least, confusing, and there's a whole blog about it:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion/new-gramophone-digital-edition-archive?page=1 

The problem is that they seem to think that everyone who subscribes is going to view it via an "app" (and, Luddite that I am, I don't even have anything that could run an app). However, their help line was also very efficient and I'm now wasting hours of my time wallowing in nostalgia.
 
Alan Bunting



>________________________________
> From: Mason Aric Vander Lugt <mavander at syr.edu>
>To: "78-l at klickitat.78online.com" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com> 
>Sent: Monday, 5 November 2012, 15:53
>Subject: [78-L] "The Gramophone" 90 years of issues are now "on line...."
>  
>The new service is a bit different from the one offered at gramophone.net. The previous offered only the text, poorly OCR'd from scans of the magazine, where the new service contains the original formatting with images. I emailed to ask them to maintain the previous version for free (since most of us won't pay the premium price for a current subscription), but they wouldn't give. Many of the pages are available for preview here:
>
>http://www.exacteditions.com/read/gramophone
>
>Mason Vander Lugt
>Technical Specialist
>
>E.S. Bird Library, Syracuse University
>Acquisitions & Cataloging
>222 Waverly Ave.
>Syracuse NY, 13210
>
>315.443.1309
>mavander at syr.edu
>
>
>