Advice for future Psychology 499 Students
Welcome newcomers! In the light of leaving behind something for future
generations, our generation decided to leave you tips on how to lessen
your frustrations trying to figure out the process of publishing reports
on the internet. Easy as it may seem, this is unlikely the case.
However, when you get your procedure down and know exactly what you have
to do and in the order in which to do them, then it's really a snap!
First things first you must locate and learn how to use at least more
than
one scanner. I say more than one because I ran into trouble with this
situation. I was so accustomed to using one scanner that I didn't account
for the fact that it's a machine, and machines tend to break down!
Especially if you don't have a scanner at home and you use the ones on
campus. There are only a few scanners on campus and therefore the usage
is very high, and it is inevitable that they will break down.
The program most frequently used by most scanners for text recognition is
called Omni-Page Professional. This is a simple program that
enables the
scanner to take scanning to another step in recognizing text. It is
essential to use a text recognizing program because if these reports were
scanned as images, then Dr. James would have to get his own server because
the image files take up so much memory. The font recognition scans the
article and turns the page into a regular document that can be edited and
processed with little memory at all.
File transferring is definitely a major issue. Make sure that you
not
only have a back up scanner but that you know how to use the file
tranferring programs on the computers themselves. For instance, if you
use an IBM PC then you will be using WS FTP to transfer your files onto
the Social Sciences server. However, if you use a MAC then you'll have to
use a different file transfer protocol like Fetch, and it can get
confusing sometimes when you look at all the options you have in
transferring files. Just make sure that you understand each program on
different computers because you may be scanning properly, but if you don't
transfer the files correctly then your home page will reflect it.
Web editors are also very useful in the tedious task of editing the
articles you have scanned. There are many different editors out there
starting with PICO which is Unix based, Hot Dog which can be tested for
free as shareware, and even Word Processors are getting into the HTML era
of publishing: the latest versions of Corel Word Perfect and also
Microsoft Word for Windows 97 also show off their HTML capabilities.
Check out Hotdog
for free!!!
GIF File Reducers. This may also be an important tool in your
scanning efforts. There are times when you will come across a table or
two that doesn't exactly work with the scanner you're using. Therefore
another option would be to scan this table or image as an graphic (or GIF)
file. The problem with this procedure is that these files take up
way too much space and take forever to load. Using the GIF file
reducer you can reduce the size of the file up to 90%!!! So this is
definitely worth checking into.....just in case!
Here's wishing you the best of luck in your research and remember that
it's independent research so you can do it whenever you wish. However,
I recommend that you spend a great deal of time in the very beginning to
learn all the things that I've mentioned so that you get your rythym and
know how long it's going to take you to finish. Then you are ready to
plan out when you're going to designate time to work on it. If you wait
and wait and wait, and you don't even know what you're doing then you're
going to be in big trouble! So at least take the time to learn the
programs and get a procedure for scanning and publishing, then you won't
stress because you don't understand computers. Have a great semester! 8)