Dec

3

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I know you will be relieved to hear that I am no longer suffering from the processing anxiety attacks I referred to in my first post. I’m still anxious, but it’s more like continuous fretfulness than bursts of panic.

I am now in the midst of my second “pass” through the Morton negatives. The first pass involved going through the whole lot of them (estimated at 33,000 items—strips, rolls, or individual frames) and sorting roughly by subject (e.g., Grandfather Mountain, Basketball, Hang Gliding, Nature). In my second pass, I’m refining those initial sorts into smaller categories (Grandfather Mountain—Events; Grandfather Mountain—Grounds and Facilities, etc.), getting all loose material into envelopes, and describing the resulting groupings in a spreadsheet. This, I must say, is a pretty satisfying stage—I’m bringing like materials together and starting to build descriptive tools that can be used to navigate the collection. Order is beginning to emerge!

Of course, most of my excitement is squelched when I remember that I’m less than one-third of the way through the second pass, and there’s still a third and probably fourth pass to be completed. Not to mention those pesky prints, transparencies, slides and films that still await attention. Take it easy, Hull. One pass at a time . . .

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