Museum scans 12,000 photos; photographs 3,000 artifacts
By: Cathy Haney, Clay County Historical Society November 30, 2011
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Editor's note: This article appeared in the Clay County Historical Society's Nov. 22 Newsletter.
It's been four years since we started the technology upgrade project here at the museum.
The object of the project is to get the catalog system and other information (i.e. history and genealogy material) entered into a new computer system. This will make it much easier and faster to locate artifacts and research material in the building.
In other words, get it out of Cathy's head and into a computer where it will not be so easily misplaced.
Before you start yelling, we know computers can "crash" and lose information. We have taken care of that. We have a backup system where once a week the material is copied onto a hard drive and that hard drive is put in a safety deposit box at the bank. That way we have record off-site.
When the project started, we had three computers in the building and one copy machine. The value of our hardware (10 computers, one printer/copy machine, six flat bed scanner and one microfilm reader/printer) has grown to about $16,500. No, we haven't spent that much money -- that's the value of the hardware.
We purchased the microfilm reading machine. Diana Shaner went online and talked the company into selling it to us at half price, just under $5,000. The rest of the hardware has been given to us. The Register of Deeds and the Appraiser's offices were replacing machines and we inherited some of the old ones. Several individuals and businesses have also shared equipment with us.
Our more tech-savvy volunteers have kept the system in the building up to date. All of the machines have been networked together -- that means they can talk to one another. We are storing all of our data on a four-terabyte RAID hard drive. That we can store 4 trillion characters in our system. In other words, we could put 57,142,857 copies of this newsletter on our system.
Each one of our computers has a black box that contains a battery so when the electricity goes out, it will run the computer five minutes before shutting down the computer. That gives operators time to save their work so the machines in the building don't crash and lose all of their recent work.
As the project goes on, more and more artifacts and materials are being recorded in the system. The volunteers and staff have scanned over 12,000 photos and photographed 3,000 artifacts.
Many people involved in process
Just because you have scanned or photographed an item doesn't mean the job is done. All entries need to be verified, someone needs to double check that right numbers and descriptions have been entered into the computer. Diana Shaner, Bonnie Thomson and Tish Collins have taken on this project.
Once the verification process is complete, they have to be prepared for storage. In the case of the pictures, they need to be put into acid-free sleeves/envelopes and then stored in drawers storing by catalog number and access number. This number tells the staff the year the photos were given to the Society and all the history of the photo to be tracked.
The history on the access sites tell the names and locations, people and places shown in the photograph, and who gave it to the Society. It is the lack of this information that has been known to make the curator more grouchy than usual.
Sometimes our scanners are not large enough to copy large photographs and framed pictures. When that occurs, Michelle Tessaro brings in her camera and photographs the items so that they can been added to the database. Sometimes that camera won't do the job.
Jeff and Diana Shaner discovered a department at Hale Library on the K-State campus that has all kinds of machines to reproduce copies of paper materials. Jeff and Diana spent a full day at the library copying oversized documents. As the project continues, they will probably another trip or two to K-State.
Museum tracking down cemetery records
As we have said elsewhere, one thing leads to another.
Amber Horton has been verifying cemetery and obituary records. This means she is checking all sources in the building to see that they are correct. Do the notes in the cemetery book agree with the obituary data? If they don't, which one is correct? She is getting very good at tracking down the right information.
As Amber is bringing the cemetery information up to date, it brought up another question. Where are people buried in our county cemeteries? This becomes an important question when people from out of town are trying to locate graves in a cemetery and the sexton's records or maps are not available. Some of these people are genealogists who want pictures of tombstones to add to their records and they really do want to find specific graves.
The problem moved over to Diana Shaner. She has begun the process of contacting the sextons of all the cemeteries in the county and asking if they have maps of the cemeteries, that are their responsibility. If they do, are they willing to let the museum borrow the map in order to make copies for our files? So far, about half the sextons have shared their maps and it is hoped more will soon be coming to the building.
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