This page contains various information about the Digital Archive, and provides hints and tips for achieving an optimum experience.
There has been some confusion about how many pages there are in the Journal. Although the page numbers only go up to 7189, there are approximately 200 unnumbered pages, and many fold-out inserts which deserve to be counted as pages. Looking at it another way, there are a total of 3737 scans of the Journal pages, with generally 2 pages per scan. Both these calculations imply a page-count of approximately 7,400.
This site has been designed to still be usable with screen sizes as small as 1024 pixels wide. Whatever width screen you have, you can get more screen space by opening links in new tabs, or by clicking a Remove Frame link. Clicking a Home link will restore the navigation frame.
While the navigation frame is displayed (on the left), bookmarking a page (or adding it to your favorites) will only ever bookmark the home page! By either clicking a Remove Frames link, or right-clicking a link and opening it in a new tab, the page will be displayed without the navigation frame, which gives more screen space, the tab's title will reflect the page's contents, the browser's address bar will reflect the correct URL for the page, and you can bookmark the page.
This site has many large pages, for example the Index page is 1 MB and most Journal page images are between 500-600 KB so there are sometimes unavoidable delays displaying pages. While you are looking at a journal page, the previous and next page images are preloaded in the background to improve the speed that they can be displayed when you turn the page. Regardless of your Internet connection speed, you can improve page refresh speeds and reduce our bandwidth load by making your browser's cache size as large as possible - ideally 100-500 MB.
If you want to print journal pages from your browser, they tend to print best when reduced to about 70-80%. Alternatively, you can click a Print link to display just the image to print or save it.
All links to other web sites appear in bold grey. If you click on one, it will open in a new tab without disturbing the archive page that you are viewing. Most of them link to appropriate Wikipedia articles. Hover the mouse pointer over the link to display more information about it.
This web site has been tested using the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers, and it is our intention to continuously correct all bugs and errors that we find, or that we are notified of. If you discover a problem, please use the feedback links to let us know about it. If you use a different browser, we would especially welcome an e-mail from you if you find any bugs — which we have no chance of finding ourselves.
Note: Old versions of the Firefox browser have a bug that makes all the thumbnail views unusable. Please download the latest version from here.
Ross used British-English spelling. This site probably mixes British and American English. The decision to write Ross's rather than Ross' was deliberate, and is consistent with Stafford Beer's spelling of it.
In early 1953, Ross experimented using shorthand in his Journal. He started using it on page 4415, and used it until page 4446, where he concluded that it had more disadvantages than advantages. He also used some shorthand symbols on his index cards and for common endings to words. Later, on page 5108, he provided a list of the symbols that he had used.
Deep linking into this site is encouraged:
Clicking on a deep link will display the page without the navigation frame. However, all pages on this site contain a home link, which can be clicked to restore the navigation frame.
Although this web site consists of 9,195 images and 10,005 HTML pages, only 30 of the HTML pages were created manually in an editor, the other 99.7% are generated using information transformations. This was the only reliable way to create so many densely cross-linked pages, based on Ross's original index.
We maintain three master XML files, which contain structured information about the journal pages, the alphabetical index cards, and the bibliographical references. We then use the open-source Saxon-B XSLT processor to run a chain of 15 XSL programs, which progressively transform and merge the 1.3 MB of information from the three master files to generate all the HTML pages for seven different logical views of the information in Ross's Journal and Index. Whenever we make any improvements or corrections that need to be propagated into the different views, it takes less than four minutes to consistently regenerate the web site.
This web site has been created by the Ashby family in our spare time:
Thanks to the following people and organizations for their support:
All the material on this web site is Copyright 2008, unless otherwise stated. All rights are reserved. Reproducing this web site in part or whole, or creating derivatives from it is forbidden. For more information, see the Copyright page.