In the third week of my History Internship at the Archives Office in Cudahy Library, we were finally able to get the scanner to work! Hooray! Once it was working, Zorian and I got to work and managed to get about half of the catalogue scanned in the first couple hours after we got the scanner working. Around the time Zorian left for the day, the cameras on the scanner, which were set to manual focus because otherwise they frequently have problems, began to take blurry pictures of the pages of the catalogue. Sadly, I didn't notice this until about an hour after it started, and as a result, a lot of my work was wasted. When I realized the problem, I talked to Kathy and Ashley, and they fixed the problem. I was able to figure out the page the blurriness seemed to begin on, so I did not have to start over completely, but over 100 pages of scans were wasted. After the problem with the cameras was corrected, I managed to get to page 300 in the catalogue of around 500 pages.
Later in the week, I went back to the University Archives Office, and Zorian and I were able to get half of the rest of the work done before he had to leave. I finished out the rest of the work, and despite lots of problems with the cameras taking blurry pictures and having to readjust the focus repeatedly after only a few scans, I got the whole rest of the catalogue done. Now Zorian and I just have to wait for Dr. Roberts to check all of the images and see if we need to redo any of them.
While working on the scans this week, I have also been slowly pacing through the documents listed on 2 pages that we took a picture of while we were having problems with the scanner. I have included these two pictures below this paragraph. I haven't had a ton of luck just yet, but I have only just begun, and I will hopefully have these first two pages done within the next couple days and be able to make more progress on other pages within the catalogue. It has been difficult for me to get used to reading the handwriting, but it is not something I have much experience with, and I am sure I will get better at it with time.
Thats all for this week. Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll continue to read my progress on the catalogue in the future.
Brian
Sadly this won't be the last time that technology will complicate the historical work that you set out to do. Good that you were able to get the scanner back on track. Detecting faint nineteenth-century ink clearly did not make the camera's work any easier!
ReplyDeleteWhat is the subject of the section of the catalogue on which you are working? Any surprising titles?