Final Stages

Week 13

This week, I focused on documenting and scanning the remaining material. Once again, I relied on my previous experience with primary documents to identify, analyze, and organize the materials at hand. Since I’ve already completed the easily identifiable items, such as the memoirs from the first citizens of River Forest in the mid-nineteenth century, or the personal notes of various River Forest citizens, the documents that remain are more difficult. I’ve also had to reconstruct documents whose unbound pages have been mixed into their boxes. I almost feel like an archeologist, digging through old papers from the past.

In addition to scanning and documenting the remaining boxes, I also began to upload them to the website. As I stated earlier, this process requires the conversion from the PDF scans to .jpeg files, which is rather time consuming. As I was converting these files, I’ve noticed an issue with the scans. Many of the older documents didn’t scan well. Not only was the paper thinner, people often wrote on both sides of the page. As a result, many of the scans not only show the text of the correct side, it also shows the imprint of the text on the reverse side. As I’m running out of time for the project, I don’t have the time to play around with it in Photo Shop, but it is an issue that I’ve brought up with Sophia.

I can’t emphasize enough how interesting I found so many of these files. I found librarian notes from 1914-1918 that described the impact of World War One on book sales, personal recollections from the turn of the twentieth century, and more, all of which detail the birth and evolution of my home town. It was a pleasant surprise to connect so personally with a project I was assigned to complete for school.