Surgical Accuracy
Our Back Scanning Project is going well, but slowly… We’ve run into a huge problem/issue. It relates to the disassembly of the books mainly in the 600 series. When these books were created registry employees often wrote close to the edge of the page. Now remember, we need to “chop” the binding off these books and then “cut” off the remaining glue and thread. The problem is removing the binding and glue without removing any characters along the tight edge. This is no easy task…in fact, we’ve had to stop using our heavy duty “book cutter”. Instead we have switched to a large “paper cutter” whose blade we can pinpoint for precise and accuracy. Trust me it takes a great deal of patients and a surgical eye. I’ve done it…of course, we’ve had the unfortunate experience of cutting a little too close and removing some of the letters. What do we do then? We painstakingly tape the cut strips containing the letters back on to the pages. Even with this obstacle we are still re-scanning 100 books a week. And I’m happy with that.
