BHA Inc Annual Reports
202220212020
All incorporated organisations are required by law to publish an Annual Report. Brisbane Hockey Association (Inc) has produced a report every year since its inception, except for a couple of years during WW2. We hope you enjoy browsing through these very important records of our history!
Please note! We are experiencing some difficulties with links to specific Annual Reports. This coincides with some changes in the way that documents hodsted by Google are accessed. Please contact the BHA Secretary to advise of any such issues as we try to fix this across all documents.
How We Had To Do It
In 2000 I started a project to digitise the entire collection of the Association's Annual Reports from 1932 through to the present. Creating and storing a PDF version of each report was seen as the best solution among several available at the time. This would allow the reports to be more accessible to anyone with an interest or a need to research aspects of the past.
Unfortunately the project turned out to involve much more time and effort than what was available to me. Another factor was the limited technology available to us back then. However, I was able to get started in 2000 and digitised some of the key years quite quickly. In 2001 Michael Corlett offered to come into the office for a few hours once a week to assist with the project. I accepted his offer and he soon set about physically dismantling each report into its individual and fragile foolscap sheets.
Michael then made plain paper A4 copies, one page at a time, which included rescaling from the larger foolscap to the smaller A4 format. He made it as far as the early 1950's - thanks Mick! I was then able to digitise the A4 copies by scanning them one sheet at a time - a technology limitation at the time. Each page was digitised as a JPEG with some compression. These were then pasted into a wordprocessor document, one digitised page per document page. Finally this document could be converted to a PDF document. We simply didn't have access to the multipage scanners of today.
As time marched on, making time for this project became difficult. Interestingly in more recent years, technology has also made some headway! It became possible to alter and speed up the the processes involved in digitising printed documents. However it has continued to remain difficult to set time aside for this project.
The Recent Reports
Reports from 2000 onwards were from the outset produced in digital format and stored according. Even so, some manipulation has been required to shrink their resultant filesizes to something more acceptable for online viewing and downloading. This has been the case particularly for the later reports containing coloured printing and photos.
All PDFs have been uploaded to Google Drive for storage and safe keeping. Use of services such as Google also saves the Association hosting and bandwidth costs. It also means that the documents are generally more manageable and more accessible to the majority.
Using the main dropdown menu (top), the sidebar or the menu (below), select the decade or year, you wish to view. If you selected a decade, then select a year from the next menu. Reports will generally open in a new window/tab, subject to your browser and/or system settings.
Using Google Drive
When using Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) to access these resources, use the control buttons at the top of the document window to:
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Note: If the controls are not visible at the top of the page, usually a tap in the middle of a page will cause them to reappear. |
Viewing Speed
There are several factors that affect the viewing or rendering speed of PDF documents, with filesize being the most obvious. The process of converting differing types and quality of original documents to PDF has caused us to adopt differing methods in some cases. This has resulted in some quite marked differences in filesizes which in turn affects the download speed.However, the time it takes for you to be able to view/download each individual PDF document may depend on several other factors in addition to the size of the PDF document file. It can be influenced by the speed of your Internet connection and your device. Wherever possible I have attempted to keep filesizes down to assist in this area. When time has permitted we have been able to reprocess some of the larger ones to smaller filesizes.
Converting to Text
Should you wish to copy and paste text from any of the reports then this will require conversion from an image format (pdf, png, jpg, etc) to a text format (txt, doc, docx, etc) - this is generally known as optical character recognision (OCR). We reommend using Free Online OCR. There are other similar services however we have found Free Online OCR to be extremely easy to use and it produces excellent results. Of course accurate results are also very much a function of the quality of the uploaded image file.
Use this " PDF to Word " link to try it out:
- download an Annual Report as a PDF to your local drive;
- tap on the " PDF to Word " link - opens in the Free Online OCR dashboard;
- follow the steps within Free Online OCR dashboard to upload the PDF, convert and then download your '.docx' version;
- open the '.docx' file with Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, etc, and work your way through the document correcting and spell checking for errors.
Note that there are some size and number restrictions when using Free Online OCR as a guest. You can get more pages by registering for free, and then even more by purchasing more pages.
Enjoy!
We trust you will be able to find your way about the decades and years. Perhaps you'll find your relative's name, your father, uncle, even your grandfather? The best place to look for names is in the lists of representative players. Of course just like today, not every player was selected in representative teams - but you never know until you look!
Another aspect of interest to some might be to find out if their Suburb ever had a Hockey Club or Team of its own. There were Clubs such as Mitchelton, Stafford, Wilston, Ashgrove, Coorparoo, Toowong, Graceville, Cannon Hill and Taringa, and so on.
Check-out the 1950 Report that records that there were twenty (20) Clubs with the Association Executive meeting twenty-nine (29) times and the General Committee meeting seven (7) times. The 1949 Report has an interesting Points Table - Points Tables are good because they list every team regardless of their final position. Not every year's Report has included a Points Table though. The 1931 Report has a Points Table.
Please enjoy reading and researching our history!