Evening Fellow List Members, Since I have just this week finalized another set of on loan Brethren periodicals I thought I would give a brief report to date of my progress. Since first entering into this endeavor some four or five years ago I have by traveling to and borrowing from several Brethren institutions, been allowed access to a large collection of Brethren Almanacs and Annuals. This combined set includes both Almanacs before the 1882 split and those after. Those before are classed in the collection as German Baptist Brethren Almanacs and those after the split as Church of the Brethren Almanacs and Brethren Church Annuals. Broken out separately are those published by Jacob Kurtz of Dayton and Covington, Ohio. Below is a brief breakdown. Those followed by "(m)" are in need being located for scanning and those with a "(s)" are owned by this writer but not yet digitized. Those followed by "(*)" denote multiple differing volumes within the same year. This was an often occurrence in the Brethren Church but not in the Church of the Brethren. You will also note that some of the earlier volumes are followed by either "(HRH)" or "(HBB)". In the early years there were two enterprises publishing almanacs-Henry Ritz Holsinger and Henry Boyer Brumbaugh-though this lasted for only a brief time. This set of records also includes Henry Miller's 1882 printing of "The Record of the Faithful." A question mark denotes my not being aware whether there is such a volume or not. If there is nothing following the volume then it indicates that the volume in question has been digitized. German Baptist Brethren Almanacs: 1871(HRH)(m), 1872(HRH), 1872(HBB)(m), 1873(HRH)(m), 1873(HBB)(m), 1874(HRH)(m), 1874(HBB)(m), 1875-1879, 1880(m), 1881, 1882 Record. Church of the Brethren Almanacs and Yearbooks: 1882(m), 1883(m), 1884, 1885(m), 1886-1915, 1916(s), 1917(s), 1918-1925. Brethren Church Annuals: 1883(?), 1884-1890, 1891(m), 1892(*), 1893(m), 1894-1899, 1900(m), 1901-1909, 1910(*), 1911-1920, 1921-1925(m). Jacob Kurtz 1880(m), 1881-1882(m)(?), 1882(m), 1884, 1885(m), 1886(m)(?). At present there is a total of 84 Brethren Almanacs and Annuals that have been digitized. The page count is 5,064 pages of raw, unadulterated images which are duplicated in another set of files for each almanac which have then been tonally adjusted. Some of the early almanacs were digitized in gray scale at 400 ppi resolution while those of the last year or so have all been in color at the same resolution. I have also scanned many of the photographs at either 1,200 or 2,400 ppi color resolution for further processing. All-in-all this one directory of archival TIF images (no JPG images for a digital archive!) totals 202.61 gigabytes of data with appropriate metadata being applied to each image. Each almanac or annual has had a PDF created for ease of use. This is qualified as an archival PDF. Then that PDF has had OCR searching enabled algorithms performed on it. For my own uses I have then taken this enhanced PDF and copied it to a master directory containing an OCRed PDF of each and every volume. Using a library catalog program aspect of Acrobat I was then able to create a set of files for which I can do a global search on each of the 84 individual PDFs. In essence a massive context sensitive search engine taking only seconds to search through. This is truly a useful tool for researchers, being able to search through an 84 volume set of almanacs and annuals. I wish to single out several people who have aided me in this enterprise. My good friend Dennis Roth for donating to me some of my earliest almanacs and for his moral support. Mr. Ken Shaffer of the Brethren Historical Library & Archives of Elgin, Illinois for his generosity in loaning me a selection of his loose volumes. The fine staff at the High Library of Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania for permitting access to their loose volumes. To Mr. David Roepke of Ashland University my heartfelt thanks for access to the Brethren Church annuals in their collection. And to the one kind lady who donated her 1898 almanac to the cause whose name escapes me at the moment. Other than the set donated by Mr. Roth this was the only other volume I was able to find outside of an institution. Finally, but not the least, Gale Honeyman for the moral support and for discussing items of interest found in this oft forgotten Brethren historical set of records. And I did purchase a large collection of some fifty or so of my own almanacs of which some of the earlier ones are included in the above report. Hopefully in the near future I can locate copies of those volumes missing above and therefore complete the set for future use by both historians and genealogical researchers. The set to date is nearly 50 years of almanacs and some thirty years of annuals and is an extremely handy tool. Of this set 25 volumes can be found at the site I maintain for use by one and all for their research uses. Cordially, A. Wayne Webb