Spot the Difference

Before coming back out to the desert I had assumed I would be working on the whole project by myself.  Very few volunteers want to drive out 30 miles or more to help deal with pictures for hours at a time.  And those who do, tend to spend summers away from the over 115 degrees that passes for normal weather in the Imperial Valley.  But I forgot: the very weather that keeps regular volunteers vacationing also means less traffic at the museum- making it slightly more likely that I could poach staff helpers for the project. They are getting something out of it too- practice with digitizing as well as added familiarity with PastPerfect and the collection.

A week into my large scale digitization project and I've got my co-workers (aka "volunteers") already pretty well trained.  Each geoglyph site gets all the pictures connected to that site laid out over several tables.  I've done a first run through on matching doubles of images but here it's a case of the more eyes (sometimes fresher than mine!) the better.  Once the images are sorted any slides are compared to the printed photos to see if there are any matches.  If so, they go together. If not, they stand alone.  My colleague Dr. David Breeckner compared it to the game "Spot the Difference" you see in the newspaper.  Two pictures are identical at first glance, but can you find the differences?

Dr. David Breeckner comparing images of a geoglyph site

Once the images are ready they are labelled with permanent Accession Numbers (AN) instead of the temporary ones they currently have.  Records are made for the PastPerfect database, images are scanned, then encapsulated, and placed in the newly labelled folders that will be their permanent home.

I know what you're thinking: if ever an archives project called for More Product Less Process, this sounds like the one!  Sadly, that's not entirely true.  The point of my particular month-long project is to digitize images for a book I'm editing for photographer Harry Casey.  One of the main points of interest for the book is not only the images, but the dates.  Casey photographed the same sites over a span of about 35 years and seeing the changes (both natural and man-made) to the sites over time is important (both for the book and for future researchers). As almost none of the printed images have dates on them, the slides (which almost all DO have dates) are essential.  Records with those dates, images and corresponding AN are a must.  So they might as well all happen at the same time.  Although I do admit that in the interest of time I'm not going into huge detail on the PastPerfect records- a future researcher can add notes to them past what I'm doing.

Marcie Rodriguez comparing slides and prints for the same image

We are becoming an increasingly well oiled machine, more efficient each day. As everyone sees what the process is, different volunteers take on different steps to make the process smoother instead of getting in each other's way.  So a big "Thank you!" to IVDM staff Marcie Rodriguez, Angelina Coble, and Dave Breeckner!

Independent Research Project and Me

 Between 2014 and 2015 I acquired for the museum a collection of nearly 10,000 photographic images.  Named after the photographer, the Harry Casey Collection is unbelievable cool- aerial photographs of geoglyphs over a span of 35 years. Many times you can see changes to sites as human interference and weather erosion have left their marks.  I don't know of any collection like this anywhere in the region, if not the country. It cries out for being digitized and finding ways to share with everyone.

But go back to my previous statement: there are nearly 10,000 images in the collection. Printed photographs, slides, negatives, contact sheets. They cover an uncountable number of individual sites (although by the end I will be able to count them) and multiple individual images per site. Needless to say, this was not a project that would be done in a day.  Over the last two years, as my other duties permit, I worked to create what archivists call "big bucket" groups.  In the case of this collection, those buckets were regional areas. Imperial County; the Colorado River, California region; the Colorado River, Arizona region; the Gila River region; the Mohave Desert; etc. Each individual site was separated into folders. And for awhile, that was sadly as far as it went.

After spending several months on furlough, I have come back the the IVDM as an independent researcher. I could afford to stay for one month.  All I would be doing was itemizing, identifying, digitizing, and encapsulating images.

The Goal: to completely digitize the entire collection, including creating PastPerfect records for each image and a finding aid

Potential End Project Results: of course there'll be a finding aid and all the images will be digitized for researchers. But let's think bigger than that. How about a touchscreen tabletop computer with all the images loaded onto it, some cool graphics and text and suddenly any visitor can spend hours in the museum checking them out! A version of that as a webpage for people who can't come to the museum? Only imagination (and technology) are the limits!

Can this be done in a month without me going insane? Or at least done in a month, sanity a possible casualty to the cause?

Stay tuned and we'll find out!