October 12th & 13th - Quality control and expressions of archival value

This week yet again saw me focusing on scanning, with a little guide editing to add a little variation in the routine. In my communications with Maureen, we have fallen into the habit the last few weeks of me scanning and she entering metadata. The going is slow on both counts, but still brisk enough that I want to make sure she has files to enter metadata for! We are at around page 230 in the spreadsheet, and only have scans up to 241.

I did take a bit of time to go over scans between all the back-up drives. There were some discrepancies...I may or may not have mentioned already that Regina and I had decided to add .jpg to the files, and then realized it made the actual file name incorrect due to Windows' need to hide extensions in the explorer view, so we then decided to go back and take it off...unfortunately I discovered this was only happening on the main user's desktop, so I took the time to copy over the correct files in the correct format to the backup flash drive and the backup user account. This also led to see some really bad scans as I was moving through the files...I added 'RESCAN' to the end of the offenders' file names, and hope to go back and re-scan as a group at some point.

Now the bad scans do have a common culprit. The earlier scrapbooks' pages were still attached to their binding when they were scanned, making it very hard to capture some of the items with the Magic Wand, and they were often pasted as far into the seam as they could possibly go, hindering the scanner's reach and smooth movement. I have been "lucky" with the third scrapbook, as acidification has basically separated every leaf from the binding, allowing for free positioning for scanning--scrapbook 3 is, fortunately or unfortunately, basically much more a large folder thank a book at this point.

My view towards the damage may seem flippant, and perhaps it is. Almost all of the articles featured in these scrapbooks are freely available at the archives I am employed by on microfilm, digitally online(albeit in unattractive digitizations), and in their original format (although we do keep those in storage and only use them if the microfilm or digitization is illegible). The value of this project thus lies in separating out these artifacts into a digital collection relating solely to NOMA and its history. It could be argued that once this collection is finalized and described, it may be nice to preserve the original scrapbooks, but the information they hold is not irreplaceable. Rather it is the new NOMA-centric organization of articles that is perhaps the largest value inherent in this project.