In essence, my work is to find records responsive to
the client's query and make copies of them - usually digital
ones. Sometimes the client has a specific document in mind, but
more 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. More rarely, a client wants proof that a
given document really exists and wants it to be
authenticated or certified.
Sequence for locating records
Usually the client comes to me with what he is looking for and
will have already queried various databases, such as those
listed on the National Archives
homepage.
I usually repeat the client's queries. Sometimes the client has
already communicated with an official archivist. If so, it can be
worthwhile for me to go to 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
dozens of historical projects, and also having to respond to
emails and telephone calls, so sometimes this is not easy.
Generally, though, their insight can really speed up a search
process. Archivists are also seriously underpaid.
In order to request the responsive material, I have to figure
out exactly where they are in the stacks. This information is
not online but found in many "Finding Aids" and "MLRs"- usually loose-leaf folders that
are being continually updated. Within them is the
information describing more or less exact location of the
responsive records, which 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.
These are then ordered by filling out a "Reference Service
Slip." The box or boxes containing the documents are then
ordered through the Reference Service Slip - and 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 now many researchers are in line 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 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.
While I look through these records, I often use a smart phone
camera to photograph or a video 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 three NARA researchers that owns
one). The
resulting digital files
are then adjusted in
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and then converted into easy to print text-searchable PDF2
files in
Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional. These files are then posted to a hidden Internet address
so that only the client will have access to them. In this way
the client can look at the material on a nightly basis. At a
maximum I can digitize some 400 - 500 pages per day, which
includes the processing at home after the material has been
scanned.
Sometimes, clients request
responsive digitized records on a CD or DVD or on a USB thumb drive. More often the
client needs the records rapidly, and they are transferred as
files over the
Internet - usually during the evening after a day of scanning or
photographing.
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.
|