mea culpa

This morning will began a “long, long” overdue project… First some background…Way Back When…we had approximately 2 million document images captured from archived microfilm and placed on CD’s. Later, when money became available these images were loaded from the CD’s onto our computer server…of course, this made the images available for viewing both internally and on the Internet. The images were captured using an “automated” scanning system…fast yes, but…no “human eye” was checking to see if an image was missing. Up until this morning we relied upon our computer users (you) to let us know if an image was missing. When someone mentioned a problem …we fixed it (not very scientific or efficient I must admit). Finally, we took the bull by the horns…This morning we assigned an employee to search from book 2705 forward looking for missing images. The process is not as time consuming as you might think…When we bring up a document entry (the indexing information) a flag appears beside the information if an image is connected to it. Fittingly, we call this an “image flag”…Simply put, the missing images are identified by finding the entries without “image flags”…and what makes this even easier is that a complete book can be brought up in one search. The checker simply scans the entire book’s entries looking for missing “image flags”. A book can be checked in about five minutes. A second employee has been assigned the task of "scanning in" the missing documents. We are starting with book 2705 because these later books are bound in plastic covers and can easily be disassembled, scanned then reassembled. A second phase of this project will be to attack the earlier books. As I began... this is a long overdue project…mea culpa, mea culpa, and mea culpa.