I find records responsive to
the client's query and make digital copies of them. Sometimes the client has a specific document or set of
records in mind, but
just as often he or she is looking for a variety of references
to a given subject over a given time period. In many cases
responsive documents are found scattered within the records of
various US government entities.
Sequence for locating records
Usually the client comes to me with a clear subject and
will have already queried various online databases, such as those
listed on the National Archives
homepage
or its newer
Online Public Access page.
In order to double-check, I usually repeat the client's queries, which usually takes
less than an hour. Sometimes the client has already communicated
with a NARA archivist. If so, it can be
worthwhile for me to talk with the archivist and go over the project
in detail. Archivists, especially those at the National Archives are
often overworked - having to deal with dozens of people asking about
a variety of unconnected historical projects, and also having to respond to
emails and telephone calls. Accordingly, NARA archivists
are not always accessible. However their insight can really
speed up a search process.
In the case of the records of some agencies, such as those of the
State Department
(depending on which year they were
created), many records can be found on the NARA website - and
more of these are being released in digital format all of the
time. In such cases I refer the client to the exact
location of the files in the NARA website. The one problem with
the digital images of records on the NARA website is that they
mostly black and white reproductions and the conversion
processes sometimes misses items written in certain colors- as
well as the color of the paper - which can make a real
difference for State Department documents.
If the records are hardcopy written records, in order to request them,
one must determine their exact location in the "stacks." Unlike
a library, these "stacks" are stored out of view. The details of
the records are
often not listed online but can be found in a "Finding Aid,"
a loose-leaf folder listing the contents of boxes by Record Group,
Entry, Box and often Folder (rg#e#b#f#). This is turn leads one to a "MLR"
(Master location register) - usually another loose-leaf folder
that details the exact location of the records in the stacks by
Record Group, Stack Area, Row, Compartment and Shelf. The location of
the records may be narrowed down to a single
folder in a box or to dozens of boxes containing several square
feet of records, depending on the subject.
Sometimes clients come to me with citations they have found in
the literature with apparently clear location information - the
exact record group, entry and box number. However, as more
records are being merged into the stacks at the archives, whole
record groups can be re-boxed, thus invalidating the old
citations. In many cases there are Finding Aids available that
reveal the concordance with and location of the cited records in
the new boxes. In some rare cases, records have been
re-boxed twice, thus greatly complicating the search.
Records are ordered and obtained by filling out a
"Reference Service
Slip" stamped and signed by an archivist. These are
then processed several times a day (weekdays only) and one can
pick up the boxes - usually placed on a cart - within a half an
hour or up to to two hours, depending on how many researchers
are waiting for them.
A maximum of 24 boxes can be checked out on a single cart, and a
total of two carts per researcher are allowed. Only two record groups can
be checked out at a time. The boxes are then taken to a
table where they can be opened and their contents examined.
A single box can take from a few minutes to go through - or more than
day, depending on the complexity of the subject, the readability
of the records, and, believe it or not, the thickness of the
documents. Many of the records from the last century are printed
on onion skin paper, which is less than half the thickness of
regular paper, which means one needs twice as much time to go
through them.
While I look through these records, I often use a smart phone
camera to photograph or video the results and then email images to the client in real time.
These photographs or videos are not designed to be used as a final
product: rather they can be used to vector in on the responsive
records.
Responsive records are either photographed with a
high-resolution camera or scanned with the
Plustek A360, the fastest and most
accurate professional large format flatbed scanner commercially
available (I am one of only two NARA professional researchers
who owns
one). The
resulting digital files
are then adjusted and edited in
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and then converted into easy to print text-searchable PDF2
files in
ABBYY
FineReader 10 and saved as
Adobe Acrobat 9.4 Professional
files. These files are then transferred to the client over a
secure Internet connection, such as
YouSendIt - often the same day. Depening on the amount of
staples to be removed, I can usually digitize some 450 pages per day, which
includes processing and text-recognition in my home-office after the
records have been
scanned.
Notes:
1
None of the scanners costing below $800.00 come close to the
speed of this scanner, which can cycle a complete scan of an
8 x 10" page (landscape) in about 1 second, a full fifteen times
faster than the other scanners on the market. It
will also handle documents as large as 12 x 17".
2 Searchable text-recognized PDF
files are created after the image has been converted into a PDF
file using an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Such
files are searchable by many search engines, such as Windows
Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search or the search tool that
in included with
Adobe Acrobat Reader. These search tools do not
work with handwriting and can be imprecise, especially with old
documents written with manual typewriters.
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