The interns started the week by adding more A-D strips, then continued work on the microfilm from Mt. Athos.
Progress slowed when the team discovered 12 microfilm of Mone Iveron 648. Oy! What a tangle! It appears that the late Prof. Westerink had trouble acquiring images that were adequate for his needs as he prepared the critical edition of the letters of Patriarch Photios I; because of missing pages, poor photography, foreign objects obscuring text, etc. , he ordered copies of the same manuscript again and again. With great patience, our team sorted out which of his microfilm had which components of the manuscript, which had which legible pages, and what the handwritten notes on each of the old microfilm boxes signified. The records they created about each microfilm will be welcome by anyone who would like to use the DO microfilm to study this specific manuscript. On Wednesday morning, the last of the Mone Iveron 648 microfilm were processed.
On Wednesday morning, the team met with Michael Sohn, a member of our Publications staff who developed the database. Michael revealed the latest and greatest version of the database. One small problem with its system for generating local call numbers, but Michael came up with a work-around. The team started work with a shared version of the final database on Thursday morning (just before lunch). By the end of the day Friday (1.5 days with the new database), the team had processed 15 records.
In the next weeks, Michael will work on mapping the data from the previous, simpler versions of the database to the new, more sophisticated one. A post about the final version of the database will be added to the blog shortly.
Other activities this week: The team added more A-D strips on Wednesday afternoon (we are picking up speed on cataloging so hard to stay ahead of ourselves!), and the team tackled more of the mystery film from Ševčenko’s collection. More success as we identified film from Uppsala, Strasburg, and other cities. Saskia pulled the short straw and worked on the biggest mystery of them all: a privately owned manuscript which she learned had once belonged to the Ashburnam collection in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (perhaps we should rename her Sherlock!)
On Friday afternoon, library casual Sarah Mackowski helped us catch up on labels and stamping boxes, after Deb types out the labels for all microfilm processed in the old versions of the database. As Saskia is fond of saying, “for the crown of martyrdom” 🙂
Total number of microfilm processed from June 6 through the end of the day June 27 (basically, three work weeks minus first day of orientation but including time spent on meetings with Michael, time lost on database and network hiccups, etc.): 115 microfilm
Manuscripts on Microfilm 