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!