Transition and Organization

Week 5

This week was very much a time of transition. I finally completed the documentation of the large assortment of circulation records, daybooks, and accession books that made up the contents of two of the boxes. I also realized the contents of a third box consisted of large reference books that would be unfeasible to scan, so I documented those as well. With that portion of the project complete, the only one I knew would not be included in my online archive, I needed to move on to the remaining seven boxes of materials.

While I went into the project thinking that I would document, scan, and upload the materials to my online archive in separate stages (as in, document everything, then scan everything, etc.), I realized that it would be less time consuming to condense the project and document and scan files simultaneously as I went along. As I was still wary of the boxes of disorganized loose-leaf materials, I decided to start with a box whose contents easily identified and obviously related: nine photo albums, all of which captured River Forest’s Centennial Celebration in 1980.

As I began scanning the first photo album, I quickly identified a difference between academia and its real life application. When I have worked with primary documents in class, professors have chosen them for a reason. They are meant to teach us something, and they generally contain an internal structure or some level of organization. In reality, primary documents are not always so neatly packaged. I quickly found that the quality of the contents of my online archive is dependent entirely on the quality of the original documents. If there are issues with the original, if the photo albums are constructed haphazardly, then the scans reflect that. I was very focused on preserving the integrity of the original document, but I also had to admit that some of the pages really did not look as good as they could. Given the look of many of the other documents I still need to go through, I imagine this will not be the last time I experience this issue.