new JASA CD-ROMs

["James W. Beauchamp" <j-beauch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jont, Mori,

Here is my experience with installing and initially using the new ASA
CD-ROM package for 1929 - 1996:

0) To start with, I have an iMac with a 15 inch screen running OS 9.04.

1) It's a nice package of ten disks in a plastic container. There are
   no instructions about how to use it, but there is a single sheet
   for "ONLINE HELP & TECHNICAL SUPPORT" which gives phone numbers,
   a fax number, and an email address for getting help. I find the
   hours, 7 AM - 1 AM M-F and 8 AM - 8 PM (EST?) weekends to be very
   satisfactory.

2) I put in the disc 4 CD, where I have a paper, and doubled-clicked on
   'STARTJASA.HTML'. That just seemed like the logical thing to do.
   This brought up my internet browser, MS Internet Explorer. This gave
   me a 'Welcome' screen. I clicked on 'ENTER'.

3) Next came up a screen which listed the volumes contained on that disk,
   in this case, Vol. 53 - 63. Not remembering which volume it was in, I
   selected 'Search'. A Search page came up, and I had to widen the window
   to get it to fit on the screen. I set it to search for 'Author' and
   'Title', and put "James W. Beauchamp" for author and "violin" for title
   keyword. It responded "no matches". I got rid of the "James W." and it
   came back with "1974 CD04 Time Variant Spectra of Violin Tones". Above
   that it said ../cd04/v56n03/p995-p1004.html. This was a clue that I
   should choose Vol 56, No. 3, which I did.

4) Next came up the cover page for Vol. 56, No. 3, and I scrolled down to
   my article and selected it. At this point I got into trouble. My MacOS
   9.04 said it didn't know what application to use to read the document.
   The document's suffix was ".djvu", so that should have been a clue. In
   my ignorance, thinking that this was the same setup as the yearly
   JASA CD's, I selected "Acrobat Reader". This crashed my iMac!

5) I called technical support. After some confusion about my pronunciation
   of "djvu", I found out that I needed to first download a copy of djvu
   from a site such as "www.djvu.com". This proved to be easy, and it
   automatically installed plugins for MSIE and Netscape.

6) I repeated steps 2, 3, and 4 above, and this time it worked and my
   paper came up! At this point I could adjust the size of the print.
   I found the default 75% fit the screen nicely, but the print was quite
   blurry. 100% was easier to read, but I had to really stretch the window
   to make it fit on a 15 inch screen. It would be easier if you could get
   rid (temporarily) of the left side bar, which you don't need to read
   the article. Selecting pages was easy, but I noted a small bug that
   causes the display of the current page not to update when you select
   from the popup window.

7) Since I don't have a printer on this iMac I can't say anything about
   However at the 100% setting the screen quality is fine.
   print quality. I'll find out when I find a machine with a printer.

8) I went back to the page where I could do more searching and played
   around. I found that "J. W. Beauchamp" works but not "James W. Beauchamp",
   even though that's what's on the article. I also found out that there are
   no abstracts of papers presented at ASA meetings, only published papers.
   Perhaps there will be a CD in the future that has all of the meeting
   abstracts.

All-in-all it's been a good experience. I'm very grateful that I can now
get rid of my "yellow wall". The only thing I suggest is that in the future
ASA include some minimal instructions with the set, including how to install
DJVU.

Jim Beauchamp
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL
j-beauch@uiuc.edu