Online at Last! A Description of the BAMS Legacy Scanning Project

One of the centerpieces of the upcoming centennial celebration of AMS's first hundred years (in 2020) is the initiation of a project which will make the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) available and searchable online from cover to cover. The new scans will be seamlessly integrated with the AMS journal articles website and in addition to going back to volume 1, number one from 1920, will include all previously omitted material from the online articles currently only available back to 1970. Thus conference accounts, announcements, awards presentations, obituaries, etc. will all be searchable--both indexed and full-text--and accessible free of charge. This talk will describe the beginning of this project and the issues encountered in setting up metadata rules, physically scanning material in different physical sizes and the decisions that had to be made when putting online material which was produced not only over the span of the life and growth of the AMS, but also over the span of the 20th century.