I have been asking questions of the archivists all along and some of them can be answered and some cannot. One that got answered today was a total surprise to me. I have been admiring the writing of the court clerks. I thought it was wonderful that everyone (my assumption) wrote like that in the 1800’s. What a surprise it was to find out that the court reporters had to go to school to learn this penmanship. I wish that all people wrote like this now – and especially for the census takers. Some of the census takers could not spell to save themselves and could not write legibly. It is totally sad these days that children are not taught cursive. How do they sign papers with a signature if they do not know cursive and better yet, how can they read cursive if they never learned to write cursive? It was brought to my attention that the Book of Mormon record was made by various writers over the course of centuries – 2200Bc to about 500ad. I wonder how different the writing styles were when Mormon made his abridgement of all the records. Did he have to rely on inspiration from God to read the records and then abridge them? Since he was a prophet, that is a plausible explanation. When we were in the Yucatan, we saw the writing style of the people who lived there and it was by pictograms. The characters that consist the Chinese way of writing (and also borrowed by the Japanese for their writing system) are actually pictograms. For example, the pictogram character they use for boat is a drawing of a boat that was carrying 8 souls. The pictogram character for love has the symbol for heart in it and so on. But the fact remains, these court clerks had pristine handwriting that I totally admire.
The books that we are digitizing right now are typed books. They are loose leaf binders essentially but they have 5 pegs to hold the pages not 3 like we have today. To take the pages out, you literally have to deconstruct the book by taking out an anchoring wire and it is hard to do, so we do not remove it to do the pages one at a time, but we put on the metadata about the book that the binding is tight. It really is VERY tight.
I have noticed that the typist has a heavy hand for certain letters on the keyboard. The impressions of the type are able to be felt as raised letters through the paper and on the surface, I can sometimes feel the indentation where the metal letter hit the page. This is remarkable considering that it has been over 100 years since these pages were typed. Of note is the period mark that almost makes a hole in the paper from the front to the back and is readily felt when I run my finger over the page. The typist had a typewriter that was showing wear – especially on the letter ‘a’ and other letters do not stand straight up and down but slant slightly and do not sit in a straight line. This appears when we put the magnifier on the words and we can see the bleed of the ink from the ribbon onto the paper and it fills some of the loops of the letters. This is not visible to the naked eye, only under magnification. I can still hear our typing teacher, Miss Goebel yelling at us for uneven rhythm in typing and for pounding on the comma’s and period keys. She said it just put holes in the paper (the paper we used wasn’t that good anyway). She said that a typist who had good rhythm was pretty to hear rather than one who just banged away at the keys some fast and some slow. I think that learning to play the piano helped me with the rhythm.
We have had 7 books to rework…………aarrgghhhh!!!!! We have to keep the metadata (information about the information in the book – now that makes a whole lot of sense doesn’t it?). To put it simply, it is a small file on the digitization that tells the reader what he/she can expect, however the nerds in the computer pool, insist on putting their own spin on things and so it is called Metadata – data about data.
So after we keep the metadata intact, we have to erase the entire book we digitized rather than search through 500 pages for the one or two pages that were considered blurred. Well, we had a session with the engineers today over the internet at Go to Meeting. After 45 minutes, we managed to remove the offending file that kept putting up the “stop signal” for us and we managed to get the Rosewell shuttle in working order. When talking to the engineer, he has control of my desktop and mouse and he can change things around but this man kept talking to me and telling me what he was doing – like in the future I am going to remember how to unscramble the whole thing if it gets scrambled again? I was not the one who scrambled the files, and he said that our shuttle was the second one this week he has had to unscramble. He is in Salt Lake City and I am in Maine and through the magic of the internet and computers we are able to communicate. I will never cease to be amazed at this connectivity thingy. We have exchanged lots of emails over this problem but it was not solved until we did the Go to Meeting conference. We have discovered that there are lots of books needing to be digitized so we may be here until the twelfth of next year (to quote Radar O’Reilly from Mash.)
It is really sad to see how degraded these books are. Not only is the canvas over cover torn and falling off one thread at a time (all over my lap usually so people will think I am quilting or something). It is not unusual for me to have threads hanging off my clothes at home from sewing or quilting, but along with the fragile rotting canvas, the leather on the books is also crumbling and turning to bright red dust that is covering everything – mostly us and the desk and the “beast digitizer”. I suppose we could become quite paranoid over the dust from the decomposing leather – wondering what germs are in them etc. but so far we have not become sick or gotten a rash on our hands form handling the books. We do get dirty, that is a given, and we have been told not to wear good clothes. Well, after the digitizing and dust and the attack on our clothes by the washers and dryers here at the apartment, they won’t be good for anything except the dust bin when we finish our mission anyway. Ann Small, one of the clerks here, gave us John Deere baseball caps to wear to shade our eyes from the glare of the lights that shine on the books when we work with them. We were using my Navy Blue felt hat but it produced so many laughs from the staff that she took pity on us and brought us the baseball caps. Mine still has the hang tag on it and I look like Minnie Pearl from the Grand Ole Oprey in Nashville.
We have a problem with blurring due to the ‘beast’ doing its little dances when we push down on the handle. So the people before us put a glass of water on the back end of the ‘beast’ and when the water stops jiggling, then the “beast” is calm enough for us to push the button to take the picture. This slows us down a lot, but at least we will not have re-works due to blurring – or so we hope. We found a bunch of rubber finger tips that help us grab the page so that it is easier to turn them. Bill has become “King of the rubber thumb” or “page turner extraordinaire” with his rubber thumb. It has given us a lot of laughs over it. It does begin to be rather hypnotic to hear the rhythmic click of the camera and it is not unusual to fall asleep at the keyboard – lulled into dreams by the monotony of the click, click, click. It is rather fun to take these little 30 second or so naps – the dreams are short, succinct and entertaining. I find myself going to Hobby Lobby in Lincoln with Sara, or walking on the beach, and when I wake up, I am fresh for about 10 minutes and then the rhythmic click, click, click, puts my brain to sleep and Bil gives me a nudge and I wake up with a start, and repeat the whole thing all over again. When it is his turn to click the camera, he falls asleep too………………no, we do not suffer from narcolepsy.
We pass the Occupy Maine movement each day to and from the archives. They still look like a rag tag bunch and it seems to have added two tents. The weather is getting colder and I wonder if they are counting the cost of their civil disobedience and disgruntled-ness in terms of getting ill from exposure. Let’s face it, these people have lived in homes for years and years and are not geared to living outdoors all winter. They are not Corey Lundin from Prescott who wanders around all year in faded red shorts and a raggy tee shirt, no shoes EVER, and his hair in a braid with a bandana about his head. Now, I know that Lundin would be able to weather any storm and would do it without a tent such as these people have – he is a survivalist – although I heard that he has tunneled a house into the side of a hill but eschews heating and cooling appliances. These people here are not Corey Lundin types.
I have found out that our apartment rent includes heat and water in the price. Wooeee! And the only thing we have to pay for is the electricity we use…………..well since we are gone all day, our electric bill should not be too high. We bought an electric blanket when we came and we are glad of that because the heat does not always go on when we need it……………….and we are from Arizona!
David has called up asking for permission to go to the house and get some stuff to take with him to his new digs in Snowflake. He has some stuff stored at the house like baseball cards from when he was little to micro machines (miniature, to scale automobiles) and his beloved video’s and let’s not forget the Samurai Swords he got many years ago at the park and swap in Phoenix. I was beside myself with fear when he squirreled one of them into his back pack and took it back to Phoenix because he did not like one of the staff and I was sure he was going to do some serious damage with the sword. Even in the hands of a complete amateur, the sword could be problematic. He also wanted to borrow the table tennis table to take to Snowflake. That would be the last we would see of that item I am sure and I do not know if the new caregiver asked him to try to get it or if David offered to snag it to have at the new placement. Either way, he does not have permission to go to the house to get anything until we return home next year. After all, he has lived without the stuff now for almost 12 years………..what is another 10 months between friends? He ha s also given us his shopping list for Christmas. He is prepared. I expect that it might take a tractor trailer to get all the stuff to him – but then Santa always has room in his sleigh to carry all the stuff doesn’t he. David told me that he is going up to Snowflake on Tuesday for the Thanksgiving break. The group home does all it can to get him out of their hair and Tuesday is a long vacation for him. I do not know when he will be returning to Hampton group home after Thanksgiving, but soon after that he is going up to Snowflake for keeps. He said that the group home is taking him up to the house where he will be staying. That is amazing. They would not bring him up to Prescott for a visit and griped about having to take him to the shuttle from the Phoenix Greyhound so that he could come up for a visit. In each group home they have put him in a small room and he says that at the new placement he will have a larger room. It matters not how big the room is, David will soon have it filled to the rafters.
So, tomorrow is Friday and the last day of the week for us to go to the Archives and digitize. We spend the morning doing the books and then about 2.30 or so in the afternoon, we prepare the shuttle for sending back to SLC for them to do their magic with them and get the images prepared for release to the public on the internet. It takes us quite a while to get the shuttle ready and then we have to take it to the FED EX place to ship out to SLC. We then have the weekend to recover and get ready for Monday.
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