It is the end of the week and I am tired. We give our mission activity everything we have and it is very tiring to stand and work the cradle or sit and stare at the computer screen to check for blurring etc. We have a missionary report meeting on Friday afternoon and it does not help that I am tired to begin with.
Bill would like to go pavement pounding with the Elders as they go visit non participating members of the church, or go tracting from house to house. Been there, done that, do not want to do it again. I am quite happy to just do the digitizing. I’ve eaten a whole bag of Dove chocolates comforting my soul.
It is interesting the way in which individual members of the Archives staff come into the room when we are there.
Jeff comes in just to check to see if we need more books brought up from downstairs. He is very diligent when we say we need new books to work on. Right now we have a trolley loaded with 16 volumes that we worked on this week, plus the 4 re-works sitting on the table and there is a newly arrived trolley with 8 volumes ready for next week. Jeff says that we have finished all the volumes available for the Penobscott County Court of Common Pleas. I think he said that the newly arrived volumes are the Judicial court. Either way, we have our work cut out for us.
Peter comes in each day to say hello. His favorite thing is to sneak into the room to see how far he can get before we notice he is there. The furthest he has managed was half way across the room. We must have been so totally absorbed in digitizing that day. This morning he came in and was working on pre-paring some microfilm to be sent to some place in Canada. We got into a discussion over how permanent is permanent in the records preservation business and how pieces of the images ‘fall off’ and are not transferred from one copy to another. For example, we have the printed page in front of us, then we digitize it but not all of the particles of the image digitize and are lost. That digital image is to be backed up somewhere on a server, and someone wants a copy made, and during that process, some bits of the image are not picked up by the device used and so more of the image is lost. It was very interesting as he explained it. We talked of how many pieces of information are stored here and there and how bits of them are lost and then the whole thing is lost when technology advances or worse yet, natural disasters destroy the collection or they degrade over time etc. He talked of the Doomsday book which was a compilation of events etc. long ago, and then in the early 1900’s someone decided to go ahead and make another type of Doomsday book. They put it on a huge CD and then technology advanced and the disk they made became obsolete and the information stored on it is now inaccessible. I think of the many 3 ½ inch floppy disks I have had to discard because no computer in our house has a 3 ½ inch reader in it. I suppose in time even the information stored on my thumb drives will be inaccessible due to advances in technology.
Art comes in to sing to us and to ‘pretend to be looking for something’. He flits around the building like a social butterfly. I have never quite figured out what he does.
Rob comes in from time to time. He is trying to land a higher position, but the funding and hiring are in freeze mode right now, so he is doing his best to keep up but is getting behind. He came in today and was talking about records preservation and the need for digitization and how he is very happy that we are doing what we are doing. He is afraid that if the effort stops, then the vast store of records will crumble with age and all of it will be lost. He said that the various agencies of the State Government has requirements of how long papers from their particular activities need to be stored. He says it is fine that they want things stored, but the warehouse where things are going is almost full and there is no room at the archive building to put more stuff into it, so it presents difficulty.
Nina is teetering on the edge of retirement. I find it hard to understand how this works for her. She is not really old enough to retire, but it seems that rules have been in place for a while as to who needs to retire at what age and she falls into the right category. Her job gives her a rather nice office next to the director and at lunch today she said she was going to retire at the end of this month and apply for a receptionist job at a business down in Randolph where she lives. Of course it will never pay what she has been earning and she said that she is not eligible for Social Security because State Employees do not pay into Social Security and since she is single and never married, she has no way she can get Social Security and so she has to go find another job. It does not make sense to me, but if that is the system then that is the system. Her retirement date has been set and re-set by her many times, so we will see her retire when she retires.
Anthony is a single gentleman who works on the second floor. I have never been down there so I do not know if he has a man cave down there or how he functions with all those books surrounding him. He eats lunch at the same time we do and he leaves as soon as he has eaten and his favorite saying is “Have a good One” as he walks out the door. He is very knowledgeable about Augusta and its historical aspects. He is a wiz at the civil war stuff and one day he and another gentleman were having quite an animated conversation about a certain battle that took place.
David Cheever is the director and we never see him.
I am adding to this blog the letter I am sending to the powers that be regarding a book written in 1816 and they want me to re-digitize it but the book is so damaged that we will get the same results. It is futile to keep copying the same stuff and getting the same results. We had to remind them some time back that the book we were working with had VERY TIGHT binding and no matter how many times we digitized it, we were going to get the same results. There is only so much intelligence allotted to this world and we seem to be running low on it in some areas of the hierarchy.
My letter to the auditors regarding a Penobscott Co. record written in 1816 that was rejected.
Terry , Manuel, Rose,:
In our recent submission we were failed on 4 of the folders. I did ask for a second opinion and the folder that was volume 11 was discussed and a sample of a blurred image was sent to me by email. I did check it against the original image and yes, it is blurred.
Just for fun, and to satisfy my own curiosity while waiting for my husband to finish the TPR and DOR, I took Volume one, written in 1816 and went through it page by page comparing the onscreen image with the page itself. I looked at each page and enlarged it to try to see if it was blurred or out of focus. The following is what I found, and these situations may have caused your algorithm to fail the folder.
Pages: 8, 10, 16, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32 have evidence of where the writer seems to have swiped the blotter across the wet ink with the smear going from the letters to the right of the page. These smears resemble flags fluttering in the wind or the marks cartoonists make to indicate speed.
Page 38 the ink has faded considerably and only the downward pen strokes seem to be clearly visible.
Page 56 is smeared by the quick movement of the blotter from left to right across the letters.
Pages 64 and 68 are barely legible and the ink has faded quite a bit. Thick ink lines (primarily downward strokes) visible, thin lines not so much. The letters in the words appear disjointed due to ink fade.
Page 74, 78, 108, 126, 128, 130, 148, 150, 160, 172, 174, 204, 216,220 show evidence of smearing.
Page 90 is barely legible, and it quite faded.
The pages in this book are fragile, they are quite discolored around the outside edges and there are fine ink splotches throughout.
I am not trying to get out of reworking, but I am totally honest when I say that reworking this particular folder will yield exactly the same results. The pages have individual words that are smeared, and these words have been like this for 196 years and redoing this folder will not make the smears go away.
I invite you to reexamine the folder. I would like to point out that one would expect to see uniform smearing/blurring throughout the pages, not just a few words here and there on the page. These are actual ink smears not uniform blurring.
such are the joys of a Senior Missionary.....you have to make a case and make it clearly.
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