Assessment of Grant thus far, June 2008

Frank Assessment of Lessons learned and advice:

-- Everyone says it, but things always take much longer than expected. I doubled the expected time but still underestimated the time the project would require.

-- Staff can often cause delays. We started out by hiring two people to do the scanning. One of these people worked for about three weeks before finding out her mother was terminally ill. She worked a few hours a week for awhile before quitting. These things cause delays but cannot be avoided. We hired another person who worked extremely slowly. We now have two very capable people plus two students who fill in on their off days who are doing excellent work.

-- We should have started the project at full force. Due to Federal budgeting issues, we were not sure when the project was going to start. We started with Phase I, the unfolding and flattening of documents. We should have started Phase II, scanning, about 3 days later. Instead, once we learned we could begin the grant, we started phase I and ordered our first Epson scanner. It took about three weeks to get the scanner from Epson. (This was not an in-stock item at the local Staples.) Then the scanner had been bumped in shipping and had to be shipped back taking at least another three weeks. This all cause fairly significant delays. In retrospect, I wish we had gone ahead and ordered the scanner when we learned we would get the grant as soon as funding was approved but we are a very small shop with limited funding and this was not possible.

-- In estimating the amount of time each scan would take, we had to use a Minolta scanner for our example. The per-scan time was different than the Epson. Also, we did not realize when preparing the grant that we needed to scan as a Professional scan rather than as a home scan. This added a couple of minutes to every scan. We seriously underestimated the scanning time.

-- Finally, a more positive lesson: this NHPRC grant is going to greatly strengthen the possibility of future scanning projects. We have two excellent large-format scanners and we understand the processes needed to implement the projects. We believe even more strongly than ever that scanning is an excellent way to increase access and also to preserve documents. Original documents can be handled twice (flattening and scanning) and then viewed many times without further damaging the documents. Scanning provides an exciting opportunity to deliver documents in the future.

I do regret that this project has been delayed. We are a small operation with just three full-time staff members and we try to work with tough situations, such as other staff members’ family illnesses. We should have been more aggressive in hiring other staff members for the grant project. We will work very diligently to get this project completed.

A final note, within the scanning field, I know the debate continues about doing it in-house versus outsourcing it. In 1936, the Troup County Courthouse burned in the middle of the day. People formed “bucket brigades” and passed court and county records out of the building to safety. Our historical records survived thanks to the heroic efforts of these people. I did not feel that I could ask for permission to remove these files from Troup County to send to a scanning company. We do not have anyone in the county who does this. It might have been possible to have had a company do the scanning in our office but this option did not seem to have any benefits.

Submitted to NHPRC by Kaye L. Minchew