January 1968 and 1969

I first reported in March 2010 that the microfiche scans provided by LSE are missing the cover pages for the January 1968 and 1969 issues. Before I left London I visited the Socialist Party of Great Britain headquarters and picked up a copy of the January 1969 issue. The archive had no more loose January 1968 issues, so I had to photocopy it from a bound volume. Unfortunately, this meant that the page was cropped along the binding edge, but it's better than no page at all.

I had also mentioned in March 2010 that the aspect ratio of the actual printed issues doesn't seem to correspond to that of the LSE scans. This is something I had forgotten about when I finally scanned these issues in yesterday, and it caused me no end of confusion when I saw the discrepancy between what I had scanned myself and what all the other scans looked like. Below are two images for comparison: the left shows my scan of the January 1969 issue cover, and the right is the same image stretched to fit the aspect ratio of the LSE scans.

Since all the other scans are distorted in this manner, I'm faced with the choice of similarly distorting my scans to match them, or else disproportionately scaling all the LSE scans to match the physical page size. Much as I would like my archive to be as faithful as possible a copy of the printed issues, I am going to have to go with the first option, at least for now. The LSE scans aren't at a high enough resolution to withstand too much image manipulation, and besides that altering them would necessitate another careful inspection of each page to ensure that there are no further unpaper anomalies.