FOR MORE INFORMATION:
 -LARC History Project- Jim VE3UA
-History web pages and web files- Leo VE3ATC

If you have any documents, photos, videos that may be of historic
interest, please contact Jim (his email is above)
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LARC HISTORY PROJECT - 75th ANNIVERSARY
by Leo Wehrstedt, VE3ATC

 The Lakehead Amateur Radio Club (LARC) was founded in 1934.

From its meager beginnings to present, LARC dedicated amateurs brought together their interests and knowledge to help each other advance in their individual and collective interests in the hobby.

Over the years, since the beginning, records of involvement, contributions, events, and technical aspects were produced which track the clubs members from the earliest members to present.

Browsing the records can be entertaining and enlightening as one sees just how much the club has meant to its members.

HISTORY PROJECT

For years, Jim O'Brien VE3UA has compiled and protected documents such as what is now HI-Q, letters, meeting minutes, and whatever else he could save from being forever lost. This amounted to boxes and boxes of records that he spent countless hours of time and energy putting into organized lists to be able to properly index and track the information.

A lot of the early records were hand written and early copies were less than perfect to read!  Jim had started to transfer these records by hand to computer friendly pages that could be stored. Again, Jim spent countless hours and days of his time transcribing hard to read, or questionable dated documents to a form others could read and follow.

In 2006, I saw the amount of work Jim put into compiling the historic records and offered to try to advance the transferring of these documents to formats and indexing that would be readily accessible to all members and be a permanent history of the club.  Jim had converted a lot of the early documents he worked on to a .pdf format.  We decided that this was the way to go and should be a standard format for some time that would not change like WordPerfect or Word that changes from time to time to new formats.

With Jim's participation, I developed a web access database program to record each and every document.  This was set up so we could separate the records and individually enter the necessary information from our home computers.  With both us working from our homes, we could see what each of us entered, along with the updates as the entries progressed.  Along the way, we ran into several instances where we changed the database fields to record other fields of information, such as document condition, type of document, etc to track the piles of records.  With progress, slow at times, we started to see the final product of our work and could identify duplicate, missing, or partial records. This would help in seeking missing information from other club members that had documents that were not in the reams of paper we had.

As work progressed, we found the amount of documents overwhelming and knew it would take the two of us months or years to convert all the outstanding records to .pdf files for eventual electronic storage on our own. 

A call went out to other club members who might be able to help convert binders of material. We did get the bulk of the outstanding documents converted.  Special thanks to Bill Unger VE3XT and Robert Mazur VA3ROM who spent hours scanning binders of written information and converting them to .pdf files.

DOCUMENTS

Final confirmation and recording of documents on hand will have to be done in the future to ensure we have converted all the records we have on hand to .pdf format.  With the boxes of documents, again, this will take a lot of time and effort. We are sure the bulk of it has been taken care of, but with the amount of pages involved, some more than likely have been missed.

PHOTOS

The club has photos going back to the date the club was formed.  These will be eventually scanned also, and converted to .jpg files so they can also be electronically stored.

Dave Kimpton VE3AVS has scanned a lot of these photos to date. (Thanks Dave!)

The photos will also have to be individually identified as to the people shown, date taken if possible and location. Again, this will take some time so will be the second stage of the History Project.

VIDEO and MEDIA

Several video tapes from the past were in the historic collection. These were in varying formats and needed to be converted to a format that could be electronically stored and available to all members either via the internet or on disc.  Thanks to the efforts of Lindo Scalese VE3NHX these have been now been converted and are on the list for eventual addition to the website (as time permits). This will be the third stage of the History Project.

PRESENTLY

Our original idea was to place all of the .pdf files, photos, and videos on CD's or DVD's with a nice artistic label.  This can still be done if there is enough interest to make the work worthwhile. The benefits of having all the records on one disk would be to be able to search the complete history and view desired documents a lot faster than over the internet.

I will placing the scanned documents, we have so far, on the club website http://www.larclub.net for viewing.  These are in .pdf format, and Adobe Reader is required to view them. Watch the club website for updates.

The documents will be listed by date, and may have some other information with the listing. Presently I am using a basic directory , which will be updated in the future to a menu system  - again as time permits- to get us started using the files.

Help from any interested members would be appreciated. For now, work is required in the following areas:

1. Comparing original documents on hand to those that have been scanned and processed to ensure we have not missed any.  (A lot of them!)
2. Identifying photos- people, dates, places, etc

Thanks to all who have taken the time and effort to contribute files or copy items that were not previously available to us.

Leo Wehrstedt, VE3ATC