A Fantastic First Week on the Job
Yesterday I finished the last shift of my first week at the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. My job is scanning archival documents from non-profit museums and libraries, which means I'm basically pushing a button and turning pages three hours a day. It's more exciting than it sounds. The scanner I used on the first day, called Phase1, wasn't a scanner at all. It's really a glorified $125,000 camera that takes high quality digital images. The Zeutschel, the other scanner, is so high-tech that it could almost put me out of a job. To scan something, one simply places the object on the machine and presses the green button. One assistant even watches Netflix during her shift. Right now, I've still managed to screw up pushing the button, so no "House of Cards" for me yet.
What I love most about the job is reading content from the books and artifacts. I work with historical documents--tangible pieces of history from across the state. Friday I scanned rotary club bulletins from the 1960s that had about 25 pages of racy jokes. I wrote down some of my favorites:
Nudist camp: a place where nothing goes on.
Low neckline: something you can approve of and look down upon at the same time.
There was also a sexist joke called the "Chemistry of Women." It claimed the acceptable atomic weight for element "Wo" is 120, listing its chemical properties as "highly ornamental," an effective "income-reducing agent," "able to absorb lots of food matter", and "turns green when placed beside a better looking specimen." Apparently this joke conformed to Rotary International's mission to encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build peace and goodwill around the world. How perspectives change with the decades!
Every day at NCDHC is a historical adventure full of unexpected surprises. Like this beautiful saying,"It takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow."
-EJS
What I love most about the job is reading content from the books and artifacts. I work with historical documents--tangible pieces of history from across the state. Friday I scanned rotary club bulletins from the 1960s that had about 25 pages of racy jokes. I wrote down some of my favorites:
Nudist camp: a place where nothing goes on.
Low neckline: something you can approve of and look down upon at the same time.
There was also a sexist joke called the "Chemistry of Women." It claimed the acceptable atomic weight for element "Wo" is 120, listing its chemical properties as "highly ornamental," an effective "income-reducing agent," "able to absorb lots of food matter", and "turns green when placed beside a better looking specimen." Apparently this joke conformed to Rotary International's mission to encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build peace and goodwill around the world. How perspectives change with the decades!
Every day at NCDHC is a historical adventure full of unexpected surprises. Like this beautiful saying,"It takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow."
-EJS
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| The Zeutschel: It's super high tech and really does everything but place objects on the scanning bed. |
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| The Phase1 camera scanner: You can see a scrapbook on the table I scanned on the first day. There is a piece of glass covering the pages to get a super flat surface, which minimizes shadows. I'm so tempted to take a selfie. |
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