#Collecting laws
4 messages in this thread
Hi, folks–
The California Desert Protection Act (S-21) has passed the Senate and been
sent to the House of Representatives. Past versions had been approved by the
House and died in the Senate, so this time they may mean it.
This bill creates a 1.5 million acre Mojave National Park, and adds another 1.5
million acres to Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Monuments, while
redesignating these as national parks. About 4 million acres of these parks
and another 4 million acres will be designated as wildernesses; the Cady Mts.,
Palo Verde Mts., Mt. Thule, and the Rodman Mts. are among the collecting
regions that will become unavailable to rockhounds.
That part of CA which will be closed to rockhounds if this law passes will be
larger than 9 states of the U.S.; USFS regulations pending may effectively
close a great deal more land to collecting, in many states including CA.
The Baucus bill (Vertebrate Paleontological Resources Protection Act) is about
to be or has been reintroduced in the Senate. I have received a copy, which I
am busily polishing up after scanning and OCR, and plan to upload after I have
finished. It does not appear at first glance to be as much a threat to
collectors as I had thought, though I may be missing something. There may be
potential problems other than for collectors here, but discussion of them
belongs elsewhere. There is a part that says "Nothing in this Act is intended
to- … (2) apply to, or require a permit for, the collection for private
purposes of a rock, mineral, or invertebrate or plant fossil that is not
protected under this Act" which worries me a bit. Does anyone know what
"private purposes" means to courts? That we cannot sell any specimens found on
public lands?
–Doug
It would seem to me that "private purposes" means private collection as apposed
to collection for financial gain.
Hi Doug–
Aside from what *I* think of it (not much, by the way, but I'm of course a
private collector!), what OCR software are you using? What scanner? (I'm using
a Chinon 3000, a 300 dpi flatbed scanner. GREAT B/W pics, but I have yet to
find ANY OCR that can handle it. And yes, I can convert the graphics into
virtually any format…..). I'm desperately seeking OCR that works and that I
can afford……….JD
Hi, Jerry–
I did not pay great attention to the scanner/OCR system I used for the Baucus
bill, which belongs to my employer. I know it came from Xerox, and cost maybe
$10,000-$20,000, making it a little impractical for the typical home user.
I figured this was a warmup before I tried scanning in my collection of
Journals of the Fluorescent Mineral Society and such things. I spent maybe 2
hours correcting bloops and realigning the text after the scan/OCR operation,
which was quick and easy. I shudder to think how it would have been with
anything less than a sharp copy of nicely typed/printed material. Since Baucus
was double spaced, this was for ~17 pages of single-space text. On a good day,
I might have been able to type it almost that fast, but the result would not
have been as accurate, I figure – after typing I would have needed to let it
'cool' for a day or two and then review it carefully. And lining it up with the
line numbers and same hyphenation breaks might have slowed me down a lot.
A sidebar in the new Scientific American hints at a day when a 2-dimensional
answer to bar codes could be included as background in printouts that would
allow flawless recovery of a text file via scanning.
–Doug