Here's something else for some of you to digest, the technically curious amongst you at least. I hesitate to say "have a play", because it's not strictly play, but you might find the payoff worth it.
The good folk who built the Papers Past platform have built a new image server, and the new image server has some really neat tricks up its sleeve.
Have you noticed that it's a little awkward to save images from PP? If you right-click on an article and "save-as" the image, you often just get part of the image, not the whole thing. This is because the article is actually several images, so it becomes a matter of chance as to which one you click on when you try and save.
Our new imageserver still works like this, but it can also do a few other very handy things - like combining those composite images of articles into a single image, which means that you can ask it to give you nice, single article images, and at whatever size you want.
Have a look at the sample link below:
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/imageserver/imageserver.pl?oid=AMBPA19040112.1.1&area=all&width=700&maxheight=2000&ext=pngOpen that link in another browser window, and you'll see a nicely proportioned front page. In that address bar, try modifying that width value of "700" to something larger or smaller and you'll see how this works. The height value can also be played with obviously, if the image cuts off the bottom of a long article.
Conversely, if you modify the text "AMBPA19040112.1.1" with the corresponding string found in the URL of any other page or article (eg ODT18820213.2.8 ) you'll get an image for that page or article instead.
Another example, of a huge long article now saved as one image file instead of many smaller images. If you click on the image it should switch between fullsize and fit-to-screen - and you'll notice that if you right-click on it, and choose "save-as", you'll get one proper image, not just a little segment.
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/imageserver/imageserver.pl?oid=ODT18820213.2.8&area=all&width=300&maxheight=10000&ext=png