Photos & Herrera metadata

Scanned a few extra photos, then worked on a few more Herrera folders: MSS160-b3-f23, -f25, -f26, and -f27.

HPLM_MSS160-b3-f27-01 is in Spanish; seems to be the same sort of layout as the text for a radio broadcast speech from an earlier folder, though. Ditto for -02, -03 (which may be a rough draft version of 01), and -04. The other two items were English, though, and I was able to complete the records for them.

Department photos & Herrera metadata

Finished up scanning the department photos with no problems.

Finished up MSS160-b3-f13, which I'd started...about a month ago! A couple of the items were only partial letters: the first page of one, the second page of another. I also completed MSS160-b3-f21 with no complications.

Deptartment Photographs - Elaine Patton, 1/9/2014

Today I worked on scanning photos out of the department albums. Have about a third-ish of the older album to complete.

Straightforward but for the apparently missing photo here and there:

• catdept-015 is on the bottom half of a page titled Surprise Party for Rosa Lin and next to a caption listing 10 names, but only 3 people are visible in that photo.
• catdept-016 is on the top half of a page for Monica Simon's leaving the catalog department; a caption of names is on the bottom half, but there's no photo to accompany it.
• catdept-018's album page has a caption listing names with no matching photo
• catdept-162's page was missing a photo.
• catdept-277's album page was missing a group picture.

Other:

• catdept-027 & -028 have both 2006 and 2007 written on the back; the latter has "January ? 2007", so I assume 2007 is just when they were added, maybe?
• 094-120 were in an envelope in the back of the newer album.

The Ladies' Messenger Scanning, Michelle Godfrey- July 10, 2013

Today I scanned ten issues of The Ladies' Messenger from 1887 to 1889. There were two folders that contained multiple copies of the same issue. In one case, that turned out to be a good thing because the issue had a page that was very dark due to aging. I used one of the duplicate copies to rescan the same page and got better results.

The incentives to get agents to sell subscriptions were interesting.  If they got 12 subscribers, they could receive a blue gold locket. With 125 subscribers, they could receive a Singer sewing machine! Considering the subscription rate of $1 per year, it doesn’t seem like the  jewelry had much value.

A Handsome Blue Gold Locket or the Handsome Singer Sewing Machine

Panorama Scanning - Elaine Patton, 6/27/2013

Images scanned today:

• MSS0100-1300 - 1323
• MSS0100-1275 - 1299

 And that's the end of the Schlueter trays! At least, the stack I've been pulling from. Lots of pictures of fig orchards in this bunch, but most amusing to me was the ad for Merit Bread toast on all the trucks in this fleet:

"Make toast your breakfast food"
Texas Bread Co.

The Houstonian scanning, Michelle Godfrey-June 26, 2013

Today I completed the scanning for The Houstonian. There were no problems with the pages but I was not able to get the covers scanned.

It was interesting to see how the front covers progressed over time. Each issue has a photo of some noteworthy individual who was featured in the magazine. At one point, these photos had a smaller size on the cover but then they got larger and filled up the majority of the space. 

The magazine deals with women's affairs and interests and there were a couple of articles that caught my attention because of the funny choice of words and the relation to HPL.

used for writes "about" woman...



Hurray for Julia Ideson

 I totally agree with this ad, especially on a hot day like today.  

North Side and The Houstonian Scanning, Michelle Godfrey-June19, 2013

Today I was able to complete the scanning of five North Side issues. There were no problems with any of them.

I also began scanning issues of The Houstonian published in 1917.  In the process of editing some of the images, I noticed that the scan for bk0073-0013 was missing.  I corrected the problem by inserting the page I had skipped and restored everything to the correct order.

 

Scanning, Michelle Godfrey- June 5, 2013

Today I was able to complete the scanning for the book, Norma Trist. It was published in 1895 and our copy was in fragile condition with the pages being dry and brittle. After reviewing the portion of the book that I finished last week, I could see that those scans were not as clear as they could be, so I re-scanned those pages to get better images.

I also saw that this book has been digitized by Google. Unlike our version, the Google copy does not have an image of the front cover and the pages are not in color.

Scanning, Michelle Godfrey - May 29, 2013

Today, I completed scanning the second issue of the Athletic Review IV. I ran into a few problems with the scanner color settings and consequently had to rescan several pages to get better images. This book was also missing four pages out of it, so the page numbering had to be adjusted for that. One of the ads in there was for a refrigerator that is "cleanable".  What that means exactly, I don't know, but that must have been a major feature of the product.

I also began scanning the book, Norma Trist and was able to complete the first half of it.

Scanning, Michelle Godfrey - May 22, 2013

Today I finished the book from last week, Port of Houston "Where Seventeen Trunk Lines Meet the Sea".  Among the many pages of interesting information, there were rate tables for all the commodities that could be handled at the Port. These lists had a lot of common things like cotton and food items, but then some odd things like 'hogs hair' and 'stacked bones'.

I also completed two other items: the Report of Examination Temporary Housing Projects, 1950-1952 and the "Athletic Review II" from 1908.

 

 

 

The Neutral Magazine, Michelle Godfrey - May 15, 2013

Today I scanned The Neutral Magazine. This publication had some interesting articles and some of the recurring feature columns were “Strange Characters in Houston”, “Motion Pictures” and “Newsboys’ Department”. The book was bound with some of the pages out of order. One of the issues went up to page 9 correctly then had pages 14/15 next. That was followed by pages 12/ 13, 10/11, and 16/17.

Another issue contained an ad that had the word, 'Lades'. I did not know if that was a typo for ladies or lads. It would definitely be an attention grabber to have the keywords 'ladies', 'soliciting', and 'attractive' in the same ad.

I also started scanning another book for the Port of Houston and got about halfway through it.





Old Vault letters & Meeting minutes - Elaine Patton, 3/25/13

Today's Old Vault Letters: MSS0113-b01f12-07, -b01f13-04, -b01f13-05.

Near the end of the first page of the first letter, there is text written perpendicular to the main text (listing the details of the deed transfer) that was a little hard to read where some of it overlapped. The clerk also writes capital Ds without a closed loop at the top, like so:

Deed

 All three follow the same boilerplate for deed/title transfer that we've seen previously, so nothing too unexpected or challenging there, aside from the typical problem of names.

I also had the unexpected joy of completing the meeting minutes digitization project-- hooray! Ten years of minutes and associated documents are all online and tagged.

Franklin Beauty School, Meeting Minutes - Elaine Patton, 3/18/13

Today I completed another box of Franklin Beauty School photos (entering metadata into a spreadsheet). Didn't encounter any problems; just found one envelope with 2 photos inside, which is marked on the spreadsheet.

I finished scanning all the pages for the meeting minutes: now to just get them all transferred into the blog. Still, the end is in sight!

Old Vault Letters, Scanning - Elaine Patton, 3/4/13

Today's Old Vault Letters:

• MSS113-b01f12-01 & .....-05
• MSS113-b01f17-01

Not the neatest writing, but still pretty legible. I'm glad we figured out the tendency to make double Ss look like Ps a while back [i.e. assigns looks like apigns], since that definitely came up. Hutchins did have a tendency to introduce odd spaces to his words at times in b01f12-01. For example:

conv ey ance

 So that's something to keep an eye out for. He also writes capital Hs with an extra loop, so it looks like he's writing He-- rather than just H--.

That plus his spacing made the words "heirs" look more like "He eirs," for instance. I also initially started to write out his name as "Heutchins" before I spotted a clearer and more sensibly-written version towards the middle of the first page.

In the third letter, the author's Ls look like Ss, e.g.:

located

...and honestly, the clerk's records were possibly the least legible of any clerk's I've encountered in these types of letters.

___
Meeting Minutes scanning:

I'm up to Feb. 2005. No difficulties, just a few pages here and there that were badly printed and so couldn't OCR very well. I decided to just type them up completely instead of bothering with copying/pasting from the scan, since that would be quicker than trying to skip over every few characters to make edits, retype this or that sentence, figure out where a handwritten note was interspersed among the typed words, etc.

Meeting Minutes, Old Vault Letters - 2/18/2013

Today I looked over the Old Vault letters Michelle had transcribed last week. Didn't add/change much since Michelle got most of it, and I couldn't parse a few of the names, either. Someone was referred to as being a second lieutenant but there was an extra word or abbreviation preceding it, so I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what it might be, to no avail. I did learn that the Confederate Army referred to "third lieutenants," though.

Scanning of the meeting minutes went smoothly. I ended with the completion of 2006.

Of note:  the May 10, 2006 minutes include the username and password for the Cataloger's Desktop, which may or may not still be used. Both are omitted from the blog entry.

Old Vault Letters & Scanning - 2/11/2013

Today I returned to doing some work on Old Vault Letters: MSS113-b01f12-02, -03, and -04.

These letters summarized: long-winded legalese without enough punctuation to cover all of them. However, all-in-all very legible with an understandable context.

This word appeared twice within a couple of lines of the first letter, and I think it's "assigns." It stumped me for a while before I recalled the sometime-habit of our various letter writers to make a double S look like a p (like so).

A few names/abbreviations are a little off, and I'm not sure what this annotation at the end of a dollar amount means (presumably it indicates no amount under a penny):

The second letter is largely a form (which did confirm to me the use of "assigns" in the first), so pretty easy to parse. Not sure what to do with this notation, however:

... part [_V] of ...

It's used multiple times with no change depending on which "part" is being referred to and was added by hand each time. Towards the bottom of the first page/beginning of the second, it started to look more like the word was "party," with the y added in as an afterthought (the full phrase being something like "said part[y?] of the second part").

The third letter/form differed slightly in that "of Texas" was printed but "The State" had to be printed in. I wonder what necessitated that. County is still printed below, so it wasn't meant for flexibility in "The State of" versus, say, "The County of." Texas was still new to being a state in the Union at the time this was written-- were some clerks very forward thinking and left room for "The State" and "The Republic"? It would seem so.

The State of Texas, County of Harris

Scanning: wasted some minor effort before I realized the scan setting for MeetingMinutes had been overwritten to scan photos to a different location; doh. Besides that, though, smooth sailing. Even one of the poorly-printed Minutes OCR'd pretty well! :) I'm back in Aug 2006 now. Also polished up a few more tags for consistency.

Minutes & Photos, 2/4/2013

I did a few more scans of Meeting Minutes and added them to the other blog; 2007 is almost done. One or two pages didn't get treated very well by OCR which slowed me down a little (in one, periods were all translated into underscores, among other errors, for some reason) but no real problems.

I spent the rest of the time recording photo information of various headshots and a few group pictures from the Franklin Beauty School, 1967-1971ish. No real problems for this, either, though one envelope actually contained 4 photos: 3 similar headshots and 1 black-and-white copy of one of them as well as a note that elucidated the reason for the multiple photos. Apparently the subject hadn't liked her original photo and, it seems, wasn't willing to pay for it, presumably leading to retakes.

Meeting Minutes scanning - 1/28/13

Today I stopped at about halfway through 2007's minutes, which seemed like a tidy place to cut off my scanning. Didn't encounter any issues.

I tidied up the tags a bit: for example, I changed the 'FLIP/CLICK' tag to just 'Flip kits' and moved "procedure" and "biography" to the front of the relevant tags to match the others. I also fixed up some of the posts I noticed had weird formatting (as I mentioned last week, I believe, these looked fine on the first round of edits, but upon posting them, the formatting didn't stick and the fonts, sizes, and colors varied). I dodged that problem with later posts by pasting first into HTML mode and then switching to Compose mode.

Meeting Minutes scanning, 01/14/2013

Same as last week but without the Internet problems, thankfully. I ended today with the minutes for Nov. 13, 2008.

I noticed I was reusing many of the tags I created last week (yay), and that I had some similar-but-different tags that will need to be edited for consistency. E.g. BWI vs BWI kits. I changed my mind about labeling procedures and will be redoing those as well (to have 'procedure' be the leading word instead of the last one). On the other hand, there's a benefit to having the "procedure" discussions next to whatever topic it is, though I don't think any of them yet overlap in that way. As it is currently, the only trailing 'procedure' tag concerns library safety/security policy and procedure, so not really jumbled, at least.

I do think it will be good to make the last thing I do for this tag clean-up, just because I've noticed recurring things that I may have already tagged once per a chronologically later minutes write-up but that I get a better understanding of as I do earlier minutes which elaborate more on a then-new subject.

Meeting Minutes scanning, 01/07/2013

Today I worked on digitizing hard copies of meeting minutes to copy over to another blog for easier reference.

The biggest challenge today: the Internet connection! It died twice, and when the real meat of one's work involves being online (editing the text to be posted and, in particular, devising tags), the lack really puts a crimp in things. Argh. Even the wired connection on the desktop computer was being difficult.

For the tags I created, I mostly went off the section headings in each set of minutes. Some were simple and straightforward, like OCLC Reclamation Project. When I noticed some overlapping subjects, I started to make joint tags, e.g. author names: Mc; author names: pseudonyms.This is something I'm going to have to revise and tweak a bit to make as coherent as possible (and to conform to any preferences for tagging, if any).

Some pages I ended up keeping as images if the layout of the content would have been too complex to introduce as text in a blog post while retaining the (important) formatting. Alas, one of the few things to criticize about Blogger is the lack of ability to upload documents in addition to images. I suppose one is expected to use Google Docs/Drive, but I didn't think it prudent to make the hosting reliant on my personal account. The posts would be a bit more streamlined if the documents could just be linked wherever a "see attached" is noted, but the images do get the job done.

I fiddled with anchor tags to try to smooth things out a bit more and in the process wasted a bunch of time with redoing them several times before determining that switching back to "Compose" mode breaks them. (Thanks, Blogger.)  Good example is this page. I think I may have broken anchor tags on another page to fix, but I've overlooked it in reviewing the entries I did. (Note to self!)