Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-332).

This thesis is a career biography, and chronicles the life and service of Stephen Clegg Rowan, an officer in the United States Navy, and his role in the larger picture of American naval history. The author has utilized mainly primary sources, including a journal kept by Rowan himself (transcribed from a microfilm copy of a handwritten journal, 900+ pages), and the Official Records of the United States military branches that were kept during the course of the Civil War. Rowan's wartime experiences and the contributions he made during the Second Seminole War, the Mexican War, and the Civil War form the framework of this paper. It also covers the interim periods, during which Rowan participated in other pursuits of the US Navy, including exploration and diplomatic ventures. It concludes with a brief overview of Rowan's accomplishments while serving in the Navy, and his family's continued military service. This thesis outlines the larger role played by the Navy in each engagement, with particular emphasis on the theaters of war in which Rowan participated (the Californian and Mexican west coast during the Mexican War, and his riverine and coastal services during the Civil War). It also examines the broader impact and influence that these experiences had on Rowan as an individual and on the navy as a whole.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 1973. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [170]-177).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 1973. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [170]-177).

HURDAT is the main historical archive of all tropical storms and hurricanes in the North Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, from 1851 to the present. HURDAT is maintained and updated annually by the National Hurricane Center at Miami, Florida. Today, HURDAT is widely used by research scientists, operational hurricane forecasters, insurance companies, emergency managers and others. HURDAT contains both systematic biases and random errors. Thus, the reanalysis of HURDAT is vital. For this thesis, HURDAT is reanalyzed for the period of 1954-1963. The track and intensity of each existing tropical cyclone in HURDAT is assessed in the light of 21st century understanding and previously unrecognized tropical cyclones are detected and analyzed. The resulting changes will be recommended to the National Hurricane Center Best Track Change Committee for inclusion in HURDAT.

The microfilm as a medium for long term preservation is still alive. Especially in archives the microfilm is part of the strategies. But also libraries are using microfilm until today – although it’s not a user-friendly media type and the access to information is very limited and uncomfortable. Examples of the German State Archives and from other countries show these strategies. Standards for microfilming are settled and well accepted. In the digital long term preservation standards are missing. The presentation will give an overview of ››Current status of analogous Long Term Preservation (examples, standards, tendencies) ››Current status of digital long term preservation (examples, tools, standards, tendencies) ››Analogous equipment ››Risk management ››Cost comparison digital vs. analogous ››Resume and practical hints

This thesis explores the cultural history of microfilm and microphotography during the period 1900–1970, thus contributing to the broader field of research on the history of 20th century information management in the era before digital technology. The aim is to study how microfilm repeatedly, in various contexts and over time, was described and perceived as a new medium. To this end the book examines and analyses the plans, dreams and visionary prognostics put forth by various historical actors with an interest in microfilm – using case studies situated at different junctures and periods (1904–1910, 1937, 1940–1952, 1950–1970), while also ranging geographically from the United States to Europe and Sweden. From a theoretical and methodological point of view the thesis seeks to understand the historical formation of microfilm by developing the notions of configuration and reconfiguration, employing a perspective which emphasizes the continuous ontological interplay and interdependence of materiality and discourse in the formation of media. Thus, at the empirical level, the analysis takes into account realized technological materialities as well as unrealized imaginary articulations, dreams and expectations integral to the configuration of microfilm within a broader culture of paperwork. As a result of this approach the study draws on scientific texts and articles in journals, as well as newspaper reports, commercial messages, ads, handbooks and various archival documents. The analysis reveals a close relationship between microfilm and experiences of entropy connected to information systems based on paper and paperwork. It is argued that, within the dreams and plans that are studied, the most important function of microfilm was to regulate noise, decay and disorder associated with the materiality of paper – through ordering, operating on and modifying the capacities of paper media. It is also noted that microfilm was perceived and articulated as a new medium over a long period of time, even though very little changed at the technological level. From a historiographical point of view, it is thus argued, microfilm can be characterized as a simultaneously continuous and discontinuous phenomenon, taking part in a history that unfolded through repetitions, returns and non-linear steps rather than along an uninterrupted, linear path.

Image registration, the process of finding the transformation that best maps one image to another, is an important tool in document image processing. Having properly-aligned microfilm images can help in manual and automated content extraction, zoning, and batch compression of images. An image registration algorithm is presented that quickly identifies the global affine transformation (rotation, scale, translation and/or shear) that maps one tabular document image to another, using the Fourier-Mellin Transform. Each component of the affine transform is recovered independantly from the others, dramatically reducing the parameter space of the problem, and improving upon standard Fourier-Mellin Image Registration (FMIR), which only directly separates translation from the other components. FMIR is also extended to handle shear, as well as different scale factors for each document axis. This registration method deals with all transform components in a uniform way, by working in the frequency domain. Registration is limited to foreground pixels (the document form and printed text) through the introduction of a novel, locally adaptive foreground-background segmentation algorithm, based on the median filter. The background removal algorithm is also demonstrated as a useful tool to remove ambient signal noise during correlation. Common problems with FMIR are eliminated by background removal, meaning that apodization (tapering down to zero at the edge of the image) is not needed for accurate recovery of the rotation parameter, allowing the entire image to be used for registration. An effective new optimization to the median filter is presented. Rotation and scale parameter detection is less susceptible to problems arising from the non-commutativity of rotation and "tiling" (periodicity) than for standard FMIR, because only the regions of the frequency domain directly corresponding to tabular features are used in registration. An original method is also presented for automatically obtaining blank document templates from a set of registered document images, by computing the "pointwise median" of a set of registered documents. Finally, registration is demonstrated as an effective tool for predictive image compression. The presented registration algorithm is reliable and robust, and handles a wider range of transformation types than most document image registration systems (which typically only perform deskewing).