A casual conversation with an old friend this morning launched me on a day-long research and development effort with our old indexes. To put it in context, our computer holds a searchable name index that reaches back to 1976. Before that, you’re stuck using the grantor/granee index books. But since those books have been victims of 30 or more years of hard usage, they’re in tough shape with broken bindings and loose pages. Since there’s no easy, quick, or inexpensive way to add names to the computerized index going back in time, we’ve been searching for a computer-assisted alternative but have not had much practical success. Using the scanned images of the existing paper index books is the most promising approach and that brings me back to today’s conversation. The end result was that we tried converting a few of the old index images to Adobe Acrobat documents with considerable success. More experimentation is needed, but I predict we’ll have a practical, inexpensive way to search pre-1976 indexes within the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
