Callbook and Callsign FAQ
A2a: This is a question that comes up frequently. The main reason is that it is a massive undertaking. What follows is derived from an assessment I made on the HamRadioHistory YahooGroup back in March of 2004. As far as I know, there has been no progress in this area since then (other than the AE7Q web site with its databases back to 1988), and I stand by the estimates I made then.
"From: Steve Melachrinos
Date: Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:48 am
Subject: Re: Callbook Archives
Msg: 8045
> I wonder if anyone knows of a free data base of old calls.
I'm not aware of anything that is searchable prior to 1991. Resources I know about are QRZ's 1993 listing and Vanity HQ's Unique Callsign Lookup. Even FCC records only go back to about 1966--earlier records are "no longer available." (See FAQ #3.)
The only resources left are the old paper callbooks. And I think this is an ENORMOUS project.
Consider that there were approximately 250 "Flying Horse" callbooks issued, plus about 18 US Dept of Commerce books (which started seven years before the Flying Horse ones). Let's suppose that each book has 300 pages and 100,000 entries. This is very low for the later ones, and high for the early ones and the supplements, but maybe it's a decent average.)
One could simply scan the pages and post images. This would make the data accessible but not easily searchable. If things work well, maybe it takes two minutes per page to scan, index, file, etc. That's ten hours per book, or 2500 hours for the Flying Horse series.
Going through the OCR process on the images involves extra processing, plus checking each entry to make sure the data was converted properly. (This is important if someone is going to do a search based on name only.) Let's estimate five minutes per page, plus 10 seconds per entry for the checking. Scanning/OCR then is 25 hours per book, plus over 275 hours per book for the checking. That's a total of over 75,000 hours just for the Flying Horse series.
Simply typing the data is even worse. I'll estimate 30 seconds per entry, or 800+ hours per book. And I haven't even dealt with the issue that many of the older books are fragile (requiring more care in handling) or would requie destruction of the binding to get flat pages for scanning.
I actually donated a book to someone who started this process. I think he gave up after ten or twenty pages, once he realized the magnitude of the effort.
If there were a market for thousands of CDs that would contain this data, perhaps someone would take it on. But my guess is that there are comparatively few people that would pay for the information on that scale. (For example, I see the same half-dozen bidders most of the time for these old books on eBay.) Although there are many people who want specific information, only a few want all of the information.
So those of us with the old books do what we can to help fill the void. Some people have charged for the information--others (like me) offer the "services" (such as they are) free of charge. I've scanned hundreds of individual pages for folks (at much more than two minutes per page), and spent many hours researching callsigns. But turning this whole collection into a database is much too big a job for any individual to take on."
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