Maresh WPA Files, Jennifer Nuzzo - October 31, 2012

I created spreadsheets for files MSS1470-00206 & MSS1470-00208 and uploaded them to CONTENTdm.

31 octobre

This Halloween day is my final day working at the Ideson building on digitising some of the Barnstone collection for the Rice Design initiative and the HPL.

Had minor issues at the end of the day where upon the scanner decided to stop working, giving me a wonderful error message.

As I had issues with the scanner warming up to me at the beginning of my work I am sure this is the scanners way of saying good bye.

Au revoir et bon Halloween!

-ryan

29 octobre

Bon lundi tout le monde.

Today worked on more Marti's drawings and sketches, a synagogue in Maine and some more overseas buildings for Schlumberger.

As my time at the library draws to an end I have appreciated my time working with the Barnstone collection. 

Today I nearly finished the second of the three file drawers that house the Barnstone's collection from which Stephen Fox so diligently pulled.

Ciao and à mercredi

-ryan

Old Vault Letters, Elaine Patton, 10/29/12

Today's letters included MSS113-...

• b01f07-01
• b01f11-02
• b01f23-02, -04, & -06

This set was mostly OCR'd type-written text to be revised and a couple of handwritten notes which were for the most part very clearly written. Only difficulty was in picking out some of the surnames being referenced. The first letter (b01f07-01) had a few small holes in the paper, but they were small enough and positioned so that there weren't any words truly obscured. All-in-all a very easy set.

Maresh WPA Files, Jennifer Nuzzo - October 25, 2012

I created spreadsheets for several MSS1470 Maresh WPA Files and uploaded them to CONTENTdm.

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - Oct. 24, 2012

Today I worked on two letters from the collection:  MSS113-b01f05-02 and -b01f05-03-01.

The first item was actually 2 separate letters from 1864. Page one was written by R. Greene to Dick Venables and page two was the reply back from Venables. The first writer (Greene) had a habit of joining a small word with the word that followed it. For example, ‘it seemed to me’ and ‘to the’ appear like this,

that it seemed to me

to the

There is also the tendency to not cross the letter ‘t’. It took awhile to figure out that this word was ‘without’ and not ‘wishous’.

were without

The second writer of page 2 (Venables) closed the letter with "In haste, Yours very truly", which may explain why he wrote in short broken phrases separated by dashes rather than fully formed sentences.  He had an interesting way of making the letter 't' which looked like an 'h'.

left next

Venables wrote a real interesting letter loaded with information about his encounter with Yankees, being in prison, and updates on the condition of fellow soldiers. This entire group of Civil War letters was outstanding. 

24 octobre

As always the Barnstone collection is a joy with which to work.
Only minor snag today was trying to decide which key number to pick for a project that had multiple key numbers.

All and all the scans are looking quite nice.

ciao

-ryan

Old Vault Letters, Elaine Patton, 10/22/2012

Today's letters: MS113-
... b01f04-01,
... b01f05-01, &
... b01f06-01.

B01f04-01 is tricky. Thin paper = bleed-through of text from the other side of the page. The handwriting isn't super messy, but there were a number of words I couldn't parse. A little research on March 1836 vis-a-vis the Texas Revolution helped elucidate some names and hopefully some of the artillery types (e.g. grape and canister shot, maybe) being requested. This is the letter behind this sentence of a short biography of William T. Austin: On March 14, 1836, Sam Houston appointed Austin his aide-de-camp with the rank of major and ordered him to Columbia to requisition artillery and horses for the army.

 Ps are shaped similarly to Houston's style with the superfluous ascender rising above the bowl of the p.

[aid][sic] de camp

It seems to be very consistent throughout the letter with no similarly-shaped non-p letters, which can provide some hints in more difficult words. For example:

proceed

 There are a couple of instances where it seems a word beginning with S uses a different form than other Ss.

shells

same

And just for comparison, three different words that are all very similarly written (hooray for context):

war, river, near

 B01f05-01 is mostly pretty clearly written; only a few uncertainties.

B01f06-01 is just a short scrap of paper, but it is not legible (at least, not to me). The pen must have been leaky, because there are ink blots all over blurring the shapes of letters or outright obscuring them. I could not even get 10% figured out. Something involving a mortgage...? The folder description is Slavery: Legal Documents, 1796-1863, which doesn't really help.

"Scribble scribble blob blob 8th 1789 scribblob."

Barnstone Architectural Drawings - Cecilia Williams - 10/22/2012

There are now 142 Barnstone architectural drawings up at the Houston Area Digital Archives. We have another 30-40 awaiting review.

Please find the images at: http://digital.houstonlibrary.org:2011/cdm/search/collection/ArchDrawing/searchterm/ricedesignalliance/field/all/mode/all/conn/and/order/title/ad/asc 

or at: http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm/search/searchterm/ricedesignalliance

The new images look great!

22e octobre

Due to the digi lab being used for filming I was, sadly, unable to work today on the Barnstone archives.

A mercredi,

-ryan

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - Oct. 17, 2012

Today I switched to the letters Elaine did last week. Overall, no major problems with this batch-
MSS113-b01f01-07

MSS113-b01f03-01
MSS113-b01f20-01

MSS113-b01f20-02

Our first letter was pretty full and colorful. Sam Houston actually used the term “gloated maggot” to describe someone. Unfortunately, near the end of the letter, there was a hole and a tear on the side of the page which made it difficult to fill in some of the missing text.  We had another nice letter written by Anson Jones to The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Her Majesty, The Queen of Spain. I enjoy reading the letters by Jones because his neat handwriting style is a nice contrast to Houston's.

17e Octobre

Despite hearing the grandfather clock chime six times whilst lying in bed today was quite a productive day.
The only major problems today were huge rips in some of the sheets for the American Bank in Galveston.  Luckily, in my opinion, the original photographs I took of those on the Canon SLR look quite nice.  Donc, if they are not able to scanned it shouldn't be such a great loss.

All in all today was a great day, par excellence  and I wish you all reading a bon week-end.

-ryan

15 octobre

Despite looming graduate school applications, tests, essays, and the occasional all nighter, today, went really smoothly, much to my chagrin.

On the Barnstone project today I saw a lot of projects from Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.  Laredo, considering its age, would make a somewhat interesting trip.  Wim Wenders inspired road trip anyone?

à bientôt

-ryan

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - Oct. 10

Today I worked on two more letters from the collection, MSS113-b01f03-03 and MSS113-b01f03-04.

Both were wonderfully legible to read which was great because the content of the second letter had a lot of detail.  These letters were written in 1844 by Anson Jones and fortunately, there were no major words or names that were troublesome. Considering how long it actually took to neatly write a letter by hand, I wonder if they could have gotten by with fewer words.  Sometimes they had such long sentences!

Old Vault Letters - Update - Cecilia Williams

I'm continuing to add the letters from the Old Vault collection. The link below should take you directly to the letters, although Elaine and Michelle should also be able to find them using their personal keywords. 

http://digital.houstonlibrary.org:2011/cdm/search/searchterm/mss0113/order/nosort

These are just fantastic. Thanks for all the hard work!

Cecilia

Sheet Music Collection Oct. 8, 2012 -Mary Sommerfeld

My work location was again the 5th floor at the sheet music cabinets.
Starting at entry # 805 I completed 35 entries (#840).
In addition there were 9 folders added to the database.
Today's grand total was 44.
Still having trouble getting the elevator to read my ID badge.

8 oct

Rescanned the gluey sheets of paper that were unsatisfactory. 
Received my badge.
Unable to find key number for T.L. Leonard warehouse in Laredo, TX.

-ryan

Old Vault Letters, Elaine Patton, 10/8/12

This week I had MSS113-b01f01-07 and MSS113-b01f03-01.

The second letter, b01f03-01, was a delightful official letter from the Dept. of State, and therefore very clearly written (hence 'delightful'). Faint pencil guidelines are still visible-- interestingly slanting smoothly downward to the right instead of being level. No difficulties whatsoever with this one.

b01f01-07 was largely pretty good, but legibility started dropping off towards the end of the letter. There are also some tears and holes near the end which chop off portions of some words, which doesn't help in trying to get context for those lines. On the other hand, I was mostly able to keep up a steady stream of typing to get most of the words, so I suppose it wasn't too bad. Still, lots of uncertain spots throughout, unfortunately.

Names were challenging:

Earls (I think)-- missing a possessive apostrophe, which he did at least one other time in this letter.

Mrs. Ma... or? Brown?

Brash...

Some annoying words:

"loathsome" took a bit of study

He kept adding a looping flourish to the end of many of his words, like so:

favor(?)
that
[judge] ment

destroy, possibly

 Aside from his (frustrating) handwriting, Houston was very enthusiastic/impassioned in this letter: lots of exclamation marks all over the place and more underlining than in other letters. This letter opens with him badmouthing someone vehemently, and later he teases his friend about socializing with "the ladies" and how little happiness is available to public servants. ("When you reach my age, you will use more philosophy, and less imagination.")