We have some great news! The AW Journal Database now includes all issues through the current year.

The greater news still is the opportunity this presents for all of us on the StreamTeam!

Yes, folks, this gives us the opportunity to pursue yet another project!

(Can I hear a "woo hoo?")

Up until May/June, 2001, we have a fairly comprehensive index of the articles. This means that the intrepid surfer can search the Journal database for articles about the Bottom Moose, or stories by Jonathan Katz, or Safety articles...for example. This has obvious benefits not only for the paddler interested in some great bathroom reading from years of yore, but also for activists researching the history of dam relicensing and access, etc. However, we have five years' worth of issues (beginning in Jul/Aug 2001) which aren't indexed. Five years of critical beta on kewell rivers and release schedules.

We can fix this--quickly!

I'll eagerly head up this project--but I need help. If a few people volunteer to take on some chunks of the missing time, we'll get the whole bloody database populated in no time.

Anyone with the appropriate permissions can edit Journal entries. After navigating to the index of the issue you're interested in, simply click on "Edit this entry," and fill in the required fields. That'd be great for filling in small discrete bits of missing info (e.g., river reach numbers)--but for several articles, with no info yet, that'd be onerous. Better would be to slap all the info for an unindexed issue into a text or Excel file, and email me the info. I'll see that the database gets updated accordingly.

We're missing--what? 30 issues? If ten intrepid volunteers each grab 3 issues and put together the index info, we'll have this baby done in no time. Please post here, listing the issues that you're adopting (so we have no overlap), and I'll email you the instructions to get you going.

I'll start: I call the year 2002.

Thanks!

Hey Matt,

I see some articles in recent journals that I would like to link to river pages. Can't do that until they are indexed, so I guess its time for me to contribute to this project. How about I start an year 2007?

Post the exact format that the information needs to be in and I will start putting it in a spreadsheet file. No promises on how fast I will complete the year, but does not sound all that hard. Can I work backwards, most recent issues first?

Paul

Paul,

Here's an Excel file which gives the data from some 2002 issues in a forMatt that I can easily work with: JournalExample.xls . It's an Excel (2003) file. If you can't open this version of Excel, here's a more generic forMatt: JournalExample.csv. It's a comma-separated-values file, which should be readable by just about anything that can read text (Word, Notepad, database apps, and etc).

The forMatt should be pretty much self-explanatory. For each article, enter the title, pages, and etc. once. If there's more than one author, or if the article's about more than one river or reach, and/or if the article's about more than one person (as many articles are), list the other rivers (or authors...) on subsequent lines. Don't enter the title more than once.

(You can't list an article ID number yet, if the article isn't in the Journal database [i.e., if the issue hasn't been indexed] yet. In those cases, just leave that field blank.)

Thanks for taking this on! The Journal database still needs plenty of maintenance.

Ratt