Posts
No. 58
Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission James Tanner" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them or click back through all the posts.
The idea of working on a FamilySearch mission as Record Preservation Specialists is to prepare and digitize documents for the vast collection of digitized records on the FamilySearch.org website. This turns out to be both challenging and complex. Every book we digitize is different and we have to analyze how each book needs to be positioned and handled. Some of the books are old and fragile. Some are relatively new but heavy and difficult to move and set up.
There is a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that says, "That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased." We can certainly see this happening as we work on digitizing books. In the beginning, we could digitize a few hundred pages a day and think we were working hard. Now, we have been passing 2000 pages a day and still, think we can do more.
For example, here is a pile of books we got this week.
They looked exceptionally bad with mold and tattered pages. The mold had supposedly been killed by irridation, but Ann wore a mask anyway. What looked like a real challenge turned out to be routine and we did the entire pile in one day.
Here is one of the large books. These run about 400 to 500 pages and weigh about 15 to 20 pounds.
They are actually quite easy to digitize once they get set up. For every book, there are some forms to fill out and information to report to FamilySearch. We also have to calibrate the camera for every book.
While one of us is digitizing books, the other one is helping prepare the individual documents for digitization.
One interesting sidelight of digitizing and preparing the records is that we can see how the handwriting and books change over the years. For example, this book has handwriting until 1919 and then suddenly, they switched to a typewriter in 1919. We can see how the technology is changing.
Older handwriting was beautiful and with some exceptions, very readable. As we see the changes into the late 1800s, the handwriting becomes worse and worse. Here is a sample of different handwriting.
Think about having to search through or index all those names.
The idea of working on a FamilySearch mission as Record Preservation Specialists is to prepare and digitize documents for the vast collection of digitized records on the FamilySearch.org website. This turns out to be both challenging and complex. Every book we digitize is different and we have to analyze how each book needs to be positioned and handled. Some of the books are old and fragile. Some are relatively new but heavy and difficult to move and set up.
There is a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that says, "That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased." We can certainly see this happening as we work on digitizing books. In the beginning, we could digitize a few hundred pages a day and think we were working hard. Now, we have been passing 2000 pages a day and still, think we can do more.
For example, here is a pile of books we got this week.
They looked exceptionally bad with mold and tattered pages. The mold had supposedly been killed by irridation, but Ann wore a mask anyway. What looked like a real challenge turned out to be routine and we did the entire pile in one day.
Here is one of the large books. These run about 400 to 500 pages and weigh about 15 to 20 pounds.
They are actually quite easy to digitize once they get set up. For every book, there are some forms to fill out and information to report to FamilySearch. We also have to calibrate the camera for every book.
While one of us is digitizing books, the other one is helping prepare the individual documents for digitization.
One interesting sidelight of digitizing and preparing the records is that we can see how the handwriting and books change over the years. For example, this book has handwriting until 1919 and then suddenly, they switched to a typewriter in 1919. We can see how the technology is changing.
Older handwriting was beautiful and with some exceptions, very readable. As we see the changes into the late 1800s, the handwriting becomes worse and worse. Here is a sample of different handwriting.
Think about having to search through or index all those names.
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