Half a research loaf, I suppose
You would think I would be a happy little researcher bunny/hedjog/mongoose to have Speshul Test Access to the digital version of an archive to which I have already paid a couple of visits in spite of its Extreme Remoteness from, well, pretty much anywhere else one might be going, and to which I have remarked, really need to go back.
And really, I should not complain, because it is being digitised as part of a much bigger digital archives project by one of those, I will not say entirely evil, and I know that actually visiting archives and libraries has a significant cost in itself especially when they are In The Middle of Nowhere, commercial operations that sells its product to libraries.
So I have finally been delving around in it and, okay, not being able to download is a bit of an issue but I can screenshot? Not ideal, but better than zilch.
But what I must whinge a bit about is that when I looked at this stuff in its home it was arranged in a particular way, and one cannot, as far as I can work out, access it via that arrangement in its digital form. (As an archivist, this annoys me quite aside from, that was how I found the stuff in the first place.)
Which actually means a certain amount of rather cumbersome searching on names, some of which I know are there and are not coming up, aaaargh. (On the other hand, I discovered a small tranche of correspondence with a Person of Interest, not listed in the previous catalogue, so roundabouts and swings, I guess.)
Also, I am not entirely sure this access is going entirely to preclude the necessity to revisit Middle of Nowhere, as in several instances names in correspondence have been redacted for the purposes of making it digitally available, though I am already not entirely convinced that this has been done in a very thorough fashion... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3029704.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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