Introduction Tim Vasquez Editor, STORM TRACK ARCHIVE

It was a brisk Sunday afternoon in February, 1997 when Tim Marshall and I sat down to a dinner of barbecue at Coach's Pub in Norman and discussed his idea of archiving all the Storm Track articles electronically. I wholeheartedly supported the idea, especially knowing that there were tons of great articles withering away in the older issues, maybe never to be seen again. Could it be done? It wasn't until summer of 1998 when I finally had the time to tackle the project.

I cannot conceive of writing this introduction without mentioning all the work that went into this archive. Work began on a bright, toasty Tuesday in late June 1998 and ended on a cold, windy evening that November. In between? Countless nights of going through five cartons of Storm Track files, separating material, scanning each page of graphics (some of which required adjustments and descreening), lifting each graphic item off the page, scanning articles through an OCR engine, correcting typos, laying out the material in a presentable format, and synchronizing the layout with each story page. I also had to write specialized software to help merge 1800 graphic files and 3.5 megabytes of text into over a thousand HTML files and write a basic search engine in Java. It was also updated in 1999 and in 2003. Needless to say, this archive is without a doubt one of the most formidable yet satisfying tasks I've ever completed.

And here it is -- hundreds of articles at your fingertips, in vibrant color, and with all the material including advertisements!

To enhance the research and educational value of this archive, I've added the full, unedited versions of submitted articles wherever possible. Of course, Storm Track was not always able to print full, unedited articles because of cost or space concerns. This archive removes those restrictions.

I'd like to thank Tim Marshall for sponsoring this project, Gene Rhoden for his ideas and thoughts, and most of all Shannon Key for her unending patience and support. Enjoy!

Tim Vasquez
Norman, Oklahoma
November 22, 1998 and June 9, 2007