What has 5 legs and is red and wobbles?
To the National Archives (and the staff at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library who implement their policies):
I know what you are trying to do. Yes, the White House Central Files are voluminous. So, in a way, it makes perfect sense to photocopy the first page of each document (which, as anybody who has worked in a bureaucracy knows, is usually a maze of staples holding together an ungodly mass of rough drafts, routing slips, coffee stains, and illegible handwriting) and to let researchers leaf through those first pages and request the whole document(s) that interest them. The flaw with this strategy comes when the first page is something like this:
You see, there is no useful identifying information there. The document that Steffen wanted Mike to see on July 9, 1975, could well be The Most Important Document In The Entire Archive, but nobody will ever know because no self-respecting researcher will have time to request every random, unidentifiable memo. Perhaps you could provide some metadata...?
Thank you for your time,
rdchino
Anyway...
After resigning myself to possibly missing The Most Important Document In The Archive today, I hit the mother lode: letters lamenting pollution written by schoolchildren to President Ford. Completely unrelated to my topic, but I had to slow down and read some. Among the more amusing (I've fixed some spelling and punctuation errors):
I know what you are trying to do. Yes, the White House Central Files are voluminous. So, in a way, it makes perfect sense to photocopy the first page of each document (which, as anybody who has worked in a bureaucracy knows, is usually a maze of staples holding together an ungodly mass of rough drafts, routing slips, coffee stains, and illegible handwriting) and to let researchers leaf through those first pages and request the whole document(s) that interest them. The flaw with this strategy comes when the first page is something like this:
You see, there is no useful identifying information there. The document that Steffen wanted Mike to see on July 9, 1975, could well be The Most Important Document In The Entire Archive, but nobody will ever know because no self-respecting researcher will have time to request every random, unidentifiable memo. Perhaps you could provide some metadata...?
Thank you for your time,
rdchino
Anyway...
After resigning myself to possibly missing The Most Important Document In The Archive today, I hit the mother lode: letters lamenting pollution written by schoolchildren to President Ford. Completely unrelated to my topic, but I had to slow down and read some. Among the more amusing (I've fixed some spelling and punctuation errors):
- Around my house there is a lot of pollution. For example: there is a slaughterhouse that stinks like heck when I go past there to go to school. And do you know why it stinks? Well, first off they throw dead pigs all around the place and let them rot. Second, the trucks that bring the pigs in drive in everyday with a fresh load of stinky pigs! And guess what? They let wild pigs into the woods wandering around. And that is just one of the pollution problems. There is a lot more problems, but I don't have enough room to tell you all of them.
- Dear Mr. President do you have a dog or cat? We need more electricity.
- Good luck in 1976. If I can help you in any way, let me know. [Ouch.]
- I'm also concerned about the animals, for instance, Gnus, there used to be thousands and thousands of them. Now there are fifty hundred. I am not saying all this can be stopped, but I think at least some could. Well, I guess that's all.
- I'm not going to my state representative because he will just stop pollution in Illinois, I think it should be stopped all over. P.S. Please don't turn me down, it's your world too.
- But now, here is a joke. What has 5 legs and is red and wobbles? [Flip the page over for the answer:] "Nothing." [Best joke ever; the president just got pranked.]
- You don't want animals to die, do you?
- We have been studying about pollution and our class has learned about it except one kid.
- Maybe we could make some kind of ocean to put the dying animals and plants in that would have clean water so they could live.