050617

While talking to someone the other day, I thought it might be interesting for you to know some of the stuff we actually do at the ROC.

We process records for patrons to look up their families names for inclusion in their family histories.  Well, basically, anyway.  Last week I was working on a couple of different projects.  One was to work with batching Revolutionary War records of soldiers.  these are not the actual records but are cards that were done by indexers that took the information from records and put them on file cards back some years ago.  I am looking at the cards and making sure there is information of use to patrons and removing a few files that are really of no value to patrons.

This is the upper portion of the card that has useful information.  I "pass" this card.

  

This is a card that really has no useful information.  It just tells another spelling of the name.  There's no pertinent information that a genealogist could use for family history.  The instruction for this particular project specifically ask that these cards be deleted or removed from the files.  

 

Once I find a file card that looks like the one above, I mark it with the big red circle and cross and it is eliminated from the batch so that only useful information is available for patrons to look at.  That way they don't waste valuable time look at cards with no useful info.  Now for some scope, I batch these cards up at around 10 cards per batch.  In one of the batches I had 717 batches of 10 cards per batch.  I've gotten pretty good at seeing the little writing that makes up the cards I need to delete so I can do one of these card batches in about an hour or so.  Takes me that long to do one of the batches and get it done.  Then someone comes along, checks my batch, and sends it off to be reviewed for accuracy and off for the the family looking for this pertinent info on their ancestor.  Indexers pull info from cards that we've batched for them to index.  See where we play the game at?

 

We also do Publication Review.  That is checking "stuff" that has been batched, then indexed, checked and is now ready for release to patrons for their use.  These are file cards that have been found to have errors in them and are going to be trashed or whatever.  I am just looking over them to make sure they can be moved along.  I need to look them over and make sure they are OK to be moved along to their final destination.  We have all kinds of things to review before they are sent off to patrons.  Duplicates, extra copies, empty copies, all kinds of different issues.  Never a dull moment.  We are usually pretty fried by the end of the week.

In addition we do indexing, zoning of newspapers for articles on deaths, births and marriage related articles (actually kind of fun as the newspapers run from the late 1800s to the late 1980s), and lots of other items to be reviewed and send on.  More to follow on another day.