How are the documents organized?

When we began this project, we had over 1000 pages of documents in only a loose chronological order. The sheer volume required that we subdivide the collection into several categories, organized chronologically within themselves. There is some gray area: some letters from the WPA are sorted into the WPA Collection, for example, rather than Correspondence, but by making each entry searchable, we hope that you will find everything you are looking for.

How were the documents scanned?

Very carefully! Fortunately, we have some training and experience in the careful handling of delicate pieces thanks to the library’s NASA Special Collection. Each piece was scanned using a standard flatbed scanner, front and back, as faithfully to the original document as possible.

One exception: careful examiners will notice that paperclips and staples appear to be missing in places. This was an intentional trade-off: while we want to present and preserve the documents in their original state, metal fastenings stain, warp, and discolor paper over the years. In the interest of the long-term health of the documents, they were carefully removed. Their original locations, along with the original layout of the stapled documents, was recorded just as carefully.

Where are the physical documents?

The original documents are housed at the library, within special archival boxes, made to be acid free and non-emissive, meaning that they do not give off gases that could harm the material of the documents. Most importantly, they protect the documents from light, the most common source of damage for books and museum pieces alike.

The item ID, barcode, and call number do not have much use in the digital database, but by referring to these, library staff can look up and locate the physical document belonging to a database entry. However, if we strive for museum standards, the digitization project will hopefully minimize this: each handling and exposure to light affects the document slightly, but irreversibly!

What are these blank pages?

Every page was scanned front and back, whether or not anything was printed on the back. The story of these documents is not told only in what was written, but how. Smudged ink, textured paper, rough cut edges and memos in the margins all serve to paint a picture of when and where each piece became part of library history, and we wanted to preserve as much context as possible.

What are all these numbers for?

These numbers are a peek “behind the scenes” at how the system created to quickly sort and organize the collection. The call number and barcode use exactly the same system as we use for books, making these documents an official (non-circulating) part of the library’s collection.

There is also an ID code [visible now only in the PDF file names] which gives a one or two character code indicating its category, followed by the “Batch Number”, referring to the groups each section was divided into for scanning, cropping, and registering. Finally, the last number indicates what number that item was within its batch, for a final format that looks like: XX-B-0-00.

Why are some items given ID numbers out of chronological order?

These items were all entered manually by the Archival Project Committee, and while we did develop a standardized procedure, we found several documents where only an approximate date could be confirmed, and its order in the timeline was not clear cut. Other documents were actually found and included in the project after others had already been entered. Fortunately, while this was a challenge during entry, it doesn’t affect the database’s ease of access.