Baker half-baked

Alright, I admit it- as a digitizer I've got a bit of a natural bias on the whole Double-Fold issue. I mean, I scan books every day, and write the specs on the contracts for our vendors when we outsource. Most of the time, we don't disbind, but ocassionally, it is necessary. Gutter margins are tight in some of these old books, especially when some idiot already went at 'em with a guillotine when they were rebound. And face it, most books older than about 75 years have been rebound at some point. I mean, do you really think that when that 1885 report of the Committee on Lunacy was originally bound they did it in bright canary yellow?

If we have to disbind a book, it comes back, goes in a custom fit archival box, and gets tucked away where it does not get pulled. That's not to say that it can't be. If someone gives a good enough (usually scholarly) reason that they need to finger up the original, then out it comes. But most people are far more interested in the contents and their legibility than they are in whether it has half a mummy embedded in it somewhere (and if that were the case, it DEFINITELY wouldn't circulate).

Okay, I admit it, OCR can be pretty bad. When the Necrologies came back, the OCR was so bad we only use it as a search aid- it doesn't display. But there's 2 of us on the project, and another 160,000 images on the way, so we don't have time to correct it at the moment. We figured, and it's been proven by those who use them, that they'd rather find the obituary of Great Uncle John's second cousin's sheep Charles and print a copy of the obit than wait a couple years. And we kept the originals, thank you very much, even though the scrapbook pages are crumbling to bits around the edges.

But, can we really be expected to pay for the crimes of our predecessors? Times have changed, and we usually don't kill off the old volumes after scanning and filming now- if it's important enough to scan, it's important enough to keep. Didn't see any solutions poppin' out of Baker either. Wish we had a time machine and could go back and dumpster dive, but we can't. Guess we'll just have to live with it and learn from our history.