Compiling Compilations

Now it is looking that through the work of Greg Stock and Greg Werner we may one day have the full set of Australian Soccer Weekly (later Australian & British Soccer Weekly) available in the archives one day, I've commenced work on making compilation files of various segments of the paper. Here's a little tutorial for anyone else that may be interested in doing the same.

Obviously a large collection like a full run of a newspaper contains a massive amount of data. The reason I'm making compilations is that some of this data related to specific competitions is not available elsewhere on the internet. The compilations may be later used to assist in addressing that. 

The compilations I'm working on are National Youth League pages, National Indoor Soccer League pages and pages on local Victorian soccer post the demise of Soccer Action. There are many other topics though, that some may want to make compilations of. Perhaps a fan of a particular NSL or state league club may want to compile a file with just the match reports of that club's matches. Or like I want to do, maybe people in other states would like a single document with the weekly page for their state or area on it. You may want to have all the women's football pages in one place etc etc.

The main website I use is https://www.ilovepdf.com/

To start, what you do is click on Split PDF then upload a issue of the paper you want to take pages from.

 

Once it is uploaded, you can select which pages you want to remove.

You can split multiple pages, so if the stuff you want is on pages 3, 4 and 5 you set that as your range and you will end up with a single file with those three pages on it. You can select multiple ranges from the one upload.

Once you have your pages split, you need to rejoin them. Simply select the Merge PDF option and upload all your split pages, line them up in the order you want them by dragging around the pages, then click on the big red Merge PDF button.

Once you have your new compilation, you may want to compress it a little and I Love PDF lets you do that as well. There is another website I do that with is well, and it's one that may be required prior to splitting some newspapers and magazines.

I Love PDF is free, but to a limit of files of a size of 100mb or less. https://tools.pdf24.org/ lets you compress files that are larger than that, which may be required for some of the newspapers in our archives. 

Select a file to upload, then wait for that to happen. It may take a while. Once the loading bar indicator is fully black, it will show you the file and it's existing size. Then you can click on the compress button.

The site compresses them a lot quicker than it takes to upload, but unlike I Love PDF does not download it's work automatically, so once the file has been compressed you will need to click on the download button.

Once that is done, you will have a compilation of pages in a manageable file size. 

As I've said, the options for making compilations are enormous. You may want to make one of player profiles only, one of a particular columnists' work (Johnny Warren, Tommy Anderson, Knut Werner), or one of national team match reports. If anyone makes a compilation which they'd like to share with others, get in touch and you can do that by having it added to the archives on this site.  

As always, click on images to enlarge.

Recent Additions to the Archives (August 2021)

To make it easier for people to see what's been added to the various archives on the blog, I'll be posting Recent Additions to the Archives posts like this every once in a while. For this one, which I've included to include (August 2021) in the title, I'll edit the post to include anything else that gets added during the month. These have come from scans by Greg Stock, so thanks again Greg.

Australian Soccer Weekly Archive

1980

April 1

October 7

October 14

October 21 (added 11/08/21)

October 28 (added 11/08/21)

November 4 (added 12/08/21)

1982

October 19 (cover added to the previously incomplete version)

1984

February 14 (added 26/08/21)

July 17 (added 29/08/21)

July 24 (added 29/08/21)

July 31 (added 24/08/21)

August 28 (added 28/08/21)

September 4 (added 29/08/21)

September 25 (added 27/08/21)

October 9 (added 27/08/21)

1985

February 19 (missing pages added, file compressed 17/08/21)

February 26 (added 16/08/21)

1986

April 1 (added 23/08/21)

April 22 (added 12/08/21)

April 29 (added 13/08/21)

May 6 (added 15/08/21)

May 13 (added 15/08/21)

July 29

August 5 (added 17/08/21)

August 12 (added 18/08/21)

August 19 (added 19/08/21)

August 26 (added 19/08/21)

1987

August 12 (added 21/08/21)

1988

January 27 (added 21/08/21)

February 3 (added 23/08/21)

June 2

November 2 (added 21/08/21)

1989

February 2 (added 29/08/21)

September 20 (added 24/08/21)

1990

April 11

April 18

May 2

1993

March 1 (added 26/08/21)

March 8 (added 31/08/21)

March 11 (added 30/08/21)

June 10 (added 25/08/21)

Australian & British Soccer Weekly Compilations

National Youth League pages - 1984 (added 29/08/21)

National Youth League pages - 1989 (added 29/08/21)

Victorian Soccer Pages - 1989 (added 29/08/21)

Victorian Soccer Pages - 1990

National Indoor Soccer League - 1989 (added 25/08/21)

Soccer Action Compilations

National Youth League pages - 1984 (added 29/08/21)

National League Programmes

Northern Spirit v Adelaide City 1998-99 (added 31/08/21)

I'm a couple of missing issues away from being able to complete ASW compilations for the 1989 National Indoor Soccer League season, as well as the 1989-90 National Youth League season. The compilations I would like to finish cover the three categories - Victorian (State/Premier League) Pages, National Youth League Pages and (James Hardie) National Indoor Soccer League Pages.

Google Drive doesn't have any stats so I have no idea what content has been viewed or downloaded, which would have been nice to know. If there are people out there downloading libraries I thought this may help alert them to new content.

Blog (Activity) Suspended

A couple of months ago I decided to retire from spending around 20 hours a week on adding to the archives contained on this blog, for a variety of reasons. 

I'd decided not to bother going to the State Library to compile newspaper compilations and do research when they reopened after yet another lockdown. I was a little dirty on them being so slow to reopen that section of the library. I had a finishing line in mind for what I noted I would be seeking in my last blog post, and it was constantly moving away from me. After the best part of a couple of years under lockdown and restrictions, sitting in libraries and on computers all the time does not seem like a liberating freedom. Neither did finding boxes of stuff to scan.

I had spent a lot of time on the computer, either scanning or creating pdfs from jpgs, joining emailed pdfs, searching for items via the Wayback Machine, most of it with a football game from somewhere being streamed and cast onto the television alongside it. What I'd noticed was that the games had become mere background noise. If I missed a goal because I was working on something, sometimes I would not even bother to catch it on the replay, so little was I invested it the match.

This was brought into sharper focus when I watched the premiere of the Optus Sport Football Belongs documentary. With many using it to argue for or against the regular political issues in the game, or the sport's place in the Australian landscape in general, I was more drawn to the glimpses of club life that I missed. The moments that reminded me of when I really felt the passion, and every kick did matter. With my two clubs now gone, and not having another one in me, those moments are gone forever.  

I'm happy enough to keep adding the contributions emailed to me by the network established over the years - great people like Paul Mavroudis, Greg Stock, George Cotsanis, Greg Werner, Peter Rowney, Graeme McGinty, Travis Faulks, Laurence Hall, Tony Persoglia, Doug Butcher, Warrick Ford and Ian Syson.

Every once in a while I may put up a list of what they have sent me and what's been added to the archives, because that will still be ticking along for a while yet. I won't be tweeting out a link to every item added as I add them, so that may be needed to keep some up to date with where to find new items.

The blog was down for a few hours yesterday after I received this email from Blogger/Google.

                                                  Click on image to enlarge

                                                       

I found the link to appeal, and the site was restored. I think the issue may have come from the advertising spam posted in the comments sections of posts and pages, so I have disabled commenting for now and spent a few hours catching up on removing comments relating to football tips, sports streams, call girls, drugs and supplements and a lot of stuff in Turkish and some Asian alphabets I didn't understand.  

This scare has made me even more wary of spending too much more time actively working towards expanding it further, given so many hours of work could one day very easily disappear with nothing to show for it.