McLennan & McFeely Catalogue

The Digitization Project

The catalogue was donated to the Archives by John Mackie, who purchased it privately. Pages which were missing or damaged were borrowed from the Burnaby Village Museum for digitization.

The pages were scanned in 24-bit colour and saved as colour-managed TIFF master files of approximately 34 MB in size. The page images are cropped to an area slightly larger than the page in order to show the entire page.

The JPEG images presented on the site are much smaller than the master files to make browsing faster, and so that the user won't have to scroll down in order to browse the catalogue. For reasons of access speed, and to make the optical character recognition (OCR) step more accurate, the PDF versions of each page have been presented as greyscale except for those pages where colour is essential.

The master TIFF files were converted to greyscale and OCR was applied to the essential words. We did not OCR every price in the price list, or quantities in the catalogue listings, as most of the OCR errors occured in the numbers. Errors in the OCR were corrected manually.

image from Mc & Mc letterhead City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS 54. 504-F-5 file 117

There are several ways to navigate the pages, as there are several ways to read the paper version. The catalogue may be browsed page by page all the way through, or by jumping to a section of interest. Within a section it is possible to jump to specific pages. Each page image links to a higher-resolution pdf of that page which can be zoomed to enlarge. Keyword searching of the pdf files is possible from the project home page.

    

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