As with other documents placed on-line by NCAS, we have attempted to preserve most aspects of the "look and feel" of the symposium record as it was printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO):

• Page breaks and page numbering match the GPO document. We have enhanced the visibility of these breaks to account for the fact that the reader must scroll the document rather than turn physical pages.

• Typeset pages, such as those in the Symposium record, suffer from "widow and orphan" problems, where a word or a short line, or a portion of a hyphenated word, are on the wrong side of a page break. Where they were noticed, these text fragments were moved to the other side of the break.

• GPO used two font sizes for most of the document: larger for oral statements by committee members and witnesses, smaller for written statements entered into the record. We have preserved this size difference, but have not attempted to control exactly which font the reader sees; font settings for your browser remain under your control. Font size settings also remain under your control, but you will always see a difference in size between oral and written statements.

Certain specific items in the Symposium record required individual treatment, either because they deviated from the general typographical conventions of the document, or because we found it necessary to introduce such deviations ourselves:

• In the GPO format of the original record, each speaker was identified as he spoke in much the same manner as actors in a dramatic script, but in a style that is time-consuming to code in HTML. That style uses all uppercase letters with capitals differentiated by size. Here is an example:

  MR. ROUSH: We will now hear from Dr. Hall.

  In place of this scheme, speaker identifications have been done in boldface with standard upper- and lowercase lettering.

• Some materials from Dr. Baker and Dr. Walker appear in typewritten form, apparently simply photocopied from their original papers and inserted into the record "as-is" by GPO. We have preserved this aspect of the GPO document. Your browser's "fixed-size" font should be set to a typewriter-like front such as Courier for this material to be seen in the form GPO intended.

• Dr. Salisbury's written statement was a photocopy of one of his journal publications, using a three-column magazine-style layout. This does not work well on the screen, so the columnar layout was eliminated. Also, certain graphic images in Dr. Salisbury's article were positioned badly (separated physically from their associated text); we took the liberty of placing these images with the text that refers to them.

There were several kinds of errors in the Symposium record to be dealt with:

• Ordinary typos, where the correct spelling was obvious, were simply corrected without noting the correction.

• Omitted words, where the word that would fill the gap was fairly obvious, have been filled in with the filler word enclosed in square brackets.

• In some cases, the correct word[s] could not be determined; these have been flagged with the standard "sic" notation.

• Some lengthy transcription errors resulted in entire sentences being garbled. Correcting these involved an exercise of judgment as to what the speaker actually intended to say. Where they occur, they are explained with an "NCAS Editor's Note."

Tables and graphics in the Symposium record were of uneven quality, so preserving their information content in the transition from paper to monitor screen was a persistent problem:

• The photographs in the symposium record were standard halftone prints, made up of a large number of small dots similar to the photographs in a newspaper but with somewhat higher resolution. It was necessary to apply "gamma correction" and brightness/contrast adjustments to some of them, in order that the on-line images would display more shades of gray, plus some fine detail that had been obscured in the original raw scan.

• In other cases (mostly graphs and labeled drawings), the size adjustment necessary to fit the image to the screen resulted in an unacceptable loss of detail. In those cases, we have included a copy of the image in its original size, available as a link from the screen-fitting image. Even then, some fine detail such as small text labels might be obscure. In those cases, the image can be saved on your machine and viewed with an image editor that has a "zoom" feature.

• A number of image scans show noticeable "bleed-through" of text from the reverse side of the original page. GPO used unusually thin paper in printing the record, and we had only limited success in our efforts to correct this problem.

• The physical appearance of the tables deviates from that of the tables as typeset in the original record. The HTML "table" construct has been utilized to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of the browser in the display of tabular data. The tables will expand and contract as the user moves the margins back and forth to enhance readability. The data in the tables are unaltered.

We have incorporated a number of features similar to those in the Colorado report, to assist the reader in moving through the Symposium record:

• Each item in the table of contents is a link to the contribution of a single Symposium participant. Some participants were witnesses, appearing in person and giving oral testimony; these participants also contributed written statements for inclusion in the record. Other participants did not appear in person, but provided written statements.

• Inside each main item is a set of sub-links to the testimony and written statement[s] of the participant. In some cases, these written statements are themselves provided with sub-links. In almost every case, the reader is no more than five or six pages away from a "BACK" link that leads eventually all the way to the title page.

• Graphic images are shown as "thumbnails" that link to the full screen-size version of that same image. This strategy promotes more rapid loading of the main text pages for each participant. The browser's "back-arrow" returns the reader to the place where the thumbnail appears.

• All the graphic images from the Symposium have been collected into an additional set of thumbnails, linked off the main table of contents, for convenience in browsing these images.

• Dr. McDonald's written statement contained an extensive numbered and dated list of sightings that he described in some detail to support his position. Many of these cases have also been described and commented on by other writers and investigative groups. For the convenience of the reader who might wish to compare the views of these other investigators with those of Dr. McDonald, an auxiliary table of contents (linked off the table of contents and from Dr. McDonald's statement) containing links to his case descriptions has been provided. It lists the cases both chronologically and grouped by type in the same manner as Dr. McDonald grouped them.

Jim Giglio, NCAS
Editor and Workgroup Coordinator
January 2001

Beth Wolszon of the University of Minnesota library located a copy of the Symposium record and provided a photocopy for scanning.

Jim Giglio did the optical scanning and HTML coding of the record, and coordinated a team of NCAS volunteers who proofread the on-screen result.

The proofreaders who performed this crucial, tedious, and often under-appreciated task, were Lynn Francis, Mary Pastel, Neil Inglis, Tim Scanlon, Barry Blyveis, and Zoe Ann Lapinski.

Additional proofreading and corrections for the Sign Historical Group edition was performed by Candy Peterson and John Stepkowski of SHG.

Sign Historical Group edition placed online, May 2002.