The International Machine Cancel Society -- Electronic Document and Social Media Projects

Social Media

The Society recognizes that it needs to maintain a presence in current electronic environments, including social media systems. To this end, the Society has a Facebook Page, and is experimenting with a machine cancel discussion group on 'groups.io'.

Website

Of course, the website for the Society remains a central source of information and documentation regarding machine cancels. The website is now an extensive source of educational materials, from Forum articles to award-winning exhibits.

The website is now facing a major challenge: search engines are ceasing to scan websites that do not work well with portable devices, such as phones and tablets. If a web page does not pass muster, it will not be searchable. The Society has made a major effort to update web pages for all devices, but many of the older content is still of the design standards of the year 2000, not of 2020. The effort to support phones, and to get on the search engines is ongoing.

Electronic Formats for Machine Cancel Documents

Some of the Society resources available on-line have been converted to portable reader formats, to allow our members to view the documents on their iPad's, Nook's, Amazon Kindle (tm) devices, and mobile smart phones.

Currently, most of the Society's documents are stored on the website in PDF format, which is readable on some of these devices. Unfortunately, PDF files are not optimized for reading on many of the smaller devices, such as smartphones.

The iPad, Nook, and others, ideally read a format called EPUB. The Kindle can read the propietary "MOBI" (or AZW3) format. The following links will allow you to download some of the Machine Cancel Society documents in formats other than PDF.

For instance, the website has many articles from past issues of the Machine Cancel Forum. These files are being updated from old HTML. It is hoped that they will be more readable on phones and tablets. For instance, recent work has taken place with the Milam and Holmes machine history article from the 2007 Forum, written by A. J. Savakis. The article is now available in Kindle (AZW3), EPUB, PDF (original), and as a webpage.

Auctions

Many more recent auction listings have been converted to e-document formats, such as Kindle, web, and EPUB. Links to these listings can be found on the archived news items web page. Auctions are listed in reverse order, the most recent first.

For information on all Society Auctions, see Machine Cancel Society auction information.

Exhibits

Our members have created a number of award-winning exhibits. These are available in both PDF format, and as web-based files. The web-based files can be viewed online and can be downloaded for offline reading. See: Machine Cancel Society Award-Winning Exhibits by Members for links to each of the exhibits.

In particular, note that Mike Ellingson's special 2016 machine cancel exhibit is available in several formats. See: Mike Ellingson's Special U. S. Machine Cancel Overview Exhibit from the NYC2016 Show.

Bob Swanson's Articles

Some of Bob Swanson's articles include:

Extracting Cancellations from Images of Scanned Covers and Stamps [.mobi file].

[For information on downloading and reading MOBI files see this webpage on how to download and view MOBI files.]

Extracting Cancellations from Images of Scanned Covers and Stamps [.epub file].

[For information on downloading and reading EPUB files see this webpage on how to download and view EPUB files.]

Using Google Book Search for Postal History Research [.mobi file]

Using Google Book Search for Postal History Research [.epub file]

Special Editions of The Machine Cancel Forum

We are proud to report that more than one special edition of the Machine Cancel Forum is available on our website in multiple formats.

For instance, a special edition of the Forum was generated for the 2009 APS Stampshow by our Forum editor. Electronic copies of this special edition have been previously made available as PDF files, including: the entire Forum as a single PDF file [9 megabytes] and individual PDF files for each article in the special Forum edition [9 megabytes].

[For information on downloading and reading PDF files see this webpage on how to download and view PDF files, and reading and extracting from ZIP files, see this webpage on how to download and extract from ZIP files.]

This special edition of the Forum is also available in the "MOBI" format, which is compatible with the Amazon Kindle (tm), and mobile "smart" phones. Interested Kindle and phone owners should try downloading the Special Edition 2009 Stampshow Machine Cancel Forum [11 megabyte .mobi file].

We have also made this special edition available in the EPUB format at Special Edition 2009 Stampshow Machine Cancel Forum [1.7 megabyte .epub file].



And that's not all: another special edition of the Forum was created by our very-busy editor for the Garfield-Perry Show in 2010. See: Special Edition Garfield-Perry Machine Cancel Forum.

The Garfield-Perry special edition did not convert well to the MOBI format, so we have created a special version of its PDF file that reads quite well on the Kindle (especially when viewed horizontally). Try: Special Edition Garfield-Perry Machine Cancel Forum ["narrow margin version", 8MB PDF file].

Military Flag Census

Our webmaster, Bob Swanson, has made available online, his spreadsheet of the current census of American Flag Cancels of Military Facilities. This file is stored on Google Documents, so does not require any special reader software. It should be readable by any web browser. The file has a Copyright statement, but the data is free to use for personal and research use. The original information for this census came from Page 61 of the previous edition of the Flag Cancel Encyclopedia by the late Frederick Langford. Bob maintains this listing of every reported date, and has enhanced the historical data by adding more dates and cancellations to the listing over the years. You can view the spreadsheet at: spreadsheet with all known usage dates of American flag cancellations of U.S. domestic military facilities of the First World War.

Software for Reading Portable Data Formats

For more information on not only the various electronic document formats, but also ways to download and view them, please refer to the MCS electronic format description page.


More Links

Main Machine Cancel Society Web Page

Contact information for the Society's President.


Updated 20 September, 2020

Page Layout Design Made Possible by: Vanilla.

Web pages designed and executed by The Swanson Group .