Capturing the history of Brisbane Bushwalkers Club Inc.

Guest blogger: Chris Hall, President of the Brisbane Bushwalkers Club Inc.

In June 2017 the biggest walking club in Brisbane embarked on a partnership with the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) to digitise all of the Brisbane Bushwalker magazines in their collection.  This project was funded by SLQ as part of the Community Heritage Digitisation Offer, which is about building the documentary heritage of Queensland by capturing publications which relate substantially to the history of our state - and to its cultural, social, economic, political or scientific development. Ultimately, this has allowed researchers to view and search past issues of our magazine for historical, personal or research purposes online.

Front cover of The Brisbane Bushwalker, February 1982

Stephen Simpson (Vice President),  Chris Hall (President) and Jeanette Simpson from Brisbane Walkers Club assisting with the digitisation of their magazine, Brisbane Walker at SLQ. Photo courtesy of Brisbane Bushwalkers Club Inc.

Helen from the Reformatting Unit explaining the Zeutschel scanner to Jeanette. Photo courtesy of Brisbane Bushwalkers Club Inc.

SLQ holds copies of the Brisbane Bushwalker back to February 1982. Every page was scanned into a format where OCR (Optical Character Recognition) could later be applied.  A small team comprising Stephen Simpson (Vice President), Jeanette Simpson and Chris Hall (President) volunteered at SLQ and helped with quality checking of the final scanned images.  The project was completed before the 70th Anniversary dinner in July this year. Our thanks go to SLQ who had up to three work units devoted to this project, including Queensland Memory, Collection Preservation and the Reformatting Unit (who we worked with at Cannon Hill).

Editions of the Brisbane Bushwalker magazine from 1982 onwards can be viewed online through State Library's One Search catalogue.

Chris Hall