Salt Archive Help

This is a work in progress to provide access to the rich sea kayaking and social content in the more than 30 year archives of the New South Wales Sea Kayak Club magazine.

This project arose from the efforts of a member who was curious to see what it took to build a website combined with a desire to make the content of past magazines more accessible and available. This turned out to be considerably more than a weekend project and some would argue that the time should have been spent on the water! Unfortunately the Club website could not support flexible searching and extraction of articles and also had insufficient storage for the complete archive, hence the need for a new solution.

For the tech-curious, the site is coded in Python, uses Flask to render pages and manages the underlying data in a MongoDB database.

When reading pdfs from this site with Adobe reader and most other readers we suggest the following settings to optimise the presentation of double page spreads. Select View > Page Display > Two Page View. For complete issues also select 'Show Cover Page' in Two Page View so that opposing pages display together. You will need to adjust this depending on the start page of individual article extracts.

You will need to log in to access magazine content although limited access to the site is possible without being logged in. Current NSWSKC members can log in using their Club website credentials (use the yellow button on the login form). The member login is accessed via functionality from the Club site and will log you in there as well.

Non-members will need to register with an email address and create a password to access content on this website.

The limited personal details collected through the login process are stored securely and will not be passed on to other parties or used for any purpose unrelated to this website.

The background to the index page is a wordcloud based on the author references in the database. The font size is determined by the number of mentions of the name in an author field. This will be updated from time to time as the completeness of the underlying data is improved.

Current members can download recent copies of the magazine using the links in the middle of the page. Club magazines are numbered sequentially and an issue can be accessed by number using the field above these links. Buttons and menu links are available to either select a past issue or to search the archive.

The search form allows a word search in title, author and location and selection of an article type. A word or phrase can be a partial match. If multiple search fields are used, the results will be combined by AND, tightly filtering the results. It will generally be more useful to only use one search criterion unless a large number of articles is returned.

If the 'List Articles' option is selected, a list of search results will be displayed with a download link in the title. If you select the link, the article will be downloaded. Some of the scanned PDFs appear to be partially corrupted and will not allow articles to be individually extracted. In these cases, the entire issue will be downloaded to your browser.

If an article has a lat/lon position recorded, it can be referenced on the map display. This display can be accessed through the menu bar or via the search page. In the latter case the map will only show icons for the subset of articles returned by the search which have a lat/lon.

If you hover over one of the kayak icons on the map, the article details will be shown in a popup. If you click the icon, a link to download the article will display. The map can be zoomed and panned using the familiar controls.

If you come across articles where a map reference would be useful but has not yet been added please feed that back.

An option to reset your password is on the 'to do' list but not yet implemented. If you are a non-member and forget your password, please contact the site administrator on the email below to reset it. If you are an NSWSKC member, you should reset you password through the Club website if you need to.

This option selects a search by title, author or tags for articles in Sea Kayaker magazine, now defunct but once world leading. Due to copyright concerns we cannot provide online access to the content but by clicking the link in the title you can download the issue and page reference. The SK magazine copy can be posted to you on loan from our library by emailing the reference to our librarian as detailed on the downloaded text.

The Sea Kayaker index is currently incomplete, with contents for issues after 2009 not yet included

This option, based on data from the index compiled initially by Paul Caffyn and maintained by the current editor, will pull articles from the KASK magazine and newsletter archive. Complete issues are only available from the KASK website.

Page numbers for multi-page articles are yet to all be entered.

Select this option to browse the contents of the Club's book collection. Books are available for loan to Club members and can be borrowed by contacting the librarian at library@nswseakayaker.asn.au

To filter for DVDs, type DVD into the format selector

Some of the data regarding articles has inaccurate page references - to be corrected as found. Page numbering schema varies in the printed material but this site assumes that the cover is page 1.