Bracey's Block Maps, Michelle Godfrey, Nov. 28, 2012

Today I worked on scanning the 1929 edition of Bracey's Block Maps of the City of Houston. The scanning process went really well and I was able to finish about half of the book. The only problems were due to the book's condition. The pages are very brittle and many of them are torn or missing pieces. There were a few times when I could find the loose pieces of a page and fit them back into place, it was a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Old Vault Letters, Elaine Patton, 11/26/12

Today's letters: MSS113...

• ...b01f02-02,
• ...b01f06-02,
• ...b01f09-01,
• ...b01f10-01.

MSS113- b01f06-02 is mostly clear with a few instances of scribbly, indistinct script and a few places where the ink has badly faded. This word (words?) was used twice near the beginning-- I believe it's "pursuit," but there's a disconnect in the middle.

 Aside from that, I'm pretty sure I parsed most of the words correctly, but the whole of the message doesn't really... flow. It has the feel of a sort of hurried, disjointed, run-on mess. Or at least, there are a lot of words placed into sentences alongside other words I wouldn't have thought had any business being alongside each other. For example:

...for and in consideration of the sum of [??? (worn page)] dollars to me in hand paid the receipt where of is hereby acknowledged.

I'm 90% certain of all the words in that sentence (save for the obvious place where the page was worn, which is presumably a numeral amount), but the phrasing is just...bewildering.

B01f02-02, b01f09-01, and b01f1001 were all nice and clear, yay. I was interested to see the word "aforesaid" used, rather than the more familiar "aforementioned."

Old Vault Letters, November 14, 2012 - Michelle Godfrey

Today's batch of letters included MSS113-b01f05-04, --b01f23-07, -08, and -09. 

The first letter was fairly legible until the final page. I could not make out most of it, but it might have been a log tracking transportation information. This was the first time I saw dates written with a slash instead of the full year.

maybe Jny 21/65

Nov 22d/64

The last three letters were OCR'd so there were only a few corrections to be made.

Maresh WPA Files, Jennifer Nuzzo - November 8, 2012

I created a beast of a spreadsheet for file MSS1470-00209 and uploaded it to CONTENTdm. I scanned two missing pages and added them to their assigned derivatives folder.

Old Vault Letters, November 7, 2012 - Michelle Godfrey

Today’s letters were the same batch Elaine did on Oct 22^nd :  MSS113-b01f04, --b01f05, and --b01f06.

First letter, written by Sam Houston, was really hard to make out for the reasons Elaine previously mentioned. There were jumbled letters that could be one word or two really close together. 

Mystery word(s)

I was also unfamiliar with artillery terms and was able to figure out the word ‘carronades’  by doing a little research about the word ‘grapes’.

supply of grape and carronades

Our second letter was much easier to read. It was written in April 1865 and had the official letterhead from the Confederate States of America.  There were several names mentioned, including  General Lee and Lincoln.

Third item was written in 1796. It’s really great that it still exists, but unfortunately it is just too illegible.