Daily Update
I knew something was up when a bird plopped on my head, Sunday. After a string of good luck last week (baggage arriving, scanner working after a long trip, finding a good residence, getting research permits without having to pass bribes, etc.), our luck finally broke on Monday when the library put up a series of roadblocks to starting our research.
After two meetings with the librarians and staff, Ron seems to think this won't be doable. They want lots of money to let us do our scans on their materials. Basically, they think we're made of money, when our budget for the scanning and material preparation is basically $0.
(I'll post the details of our project later on, for those of you who haven't heard about it.)
Anyway, I've been having much better results with a research outfit about a 30-minute taxi ride from our house. The head librarian there seems very enthusiastic about helping us help the Center catch up on a backlog of digitizations. They're missing about 15 years worth of documents, and we'll be archiving a lot of that material for them. Anyway, we managed to work out a deal, whereby we pay (affordable) affiliation fees, and we can scan basically as much material as we can in the few weeks we have left. We just leave copies of the files with them. It's a sweet deal, and it lays the foundations for some pretty close collaborations between this project and the Center. (And it doesn't hurt that the Librarian, Charles, and I get along pretty well.)
So it's been a surprise: couldn't work where we planned, but found an interesting alternative.
Oh, and we have heard of two other places that might have large repositories of the materials we're looking for -- we didn't even have to dig for this stuff, and it's already bobbing to the surface!
After two meetings with the librarians and staff, Ron seems to think this won't be doable. They want lots of money to let us do our scans on their materials. Basically, they think we're made of money, when our budget for the scanning and material preparation is basically $0.
(I'll post the details of our project later on, for those of you who haven't heard about it.)
Anyway, I've been having much better results with a research outfit about a 30-minute taxi ride from our house. The head librarian there seems very enthusiastic about helping us help the Center catch up on a backlog of digitizations. They're missing about 15 years worth of documents, and we'll be archiving a lot of that material for them. Anyway, we managed to work out a deal, whereby we pay (affordable) affiliation fees, and we can scan basically as much material as we can in the few weeks we have left. We just leave copies of the files with them. It's a sweet deal, and it lays the foundations for some pretty close collaborations between this project and the Center. (And it doesn't hurt that the Librarian, Charles, and I get along pretty well.)
So it's been a surprise: couldn't work where we planned, but found an interesting alternative.
Oh, and we have heard of two other places that might have large repositories of the materials we're looking for -- we didn't even have to dig for this stuff, and it's already bobbing to the surface!
<< Home