Without going into the actual issue of destroying the documents, I find the preservation process slightly disappointing. From the timeline:
* Late May, early June, 2013 – Work began, using a few volunteers,...
* August 5, 2013 ... A request was made to The United Way to supply the Society with computers and Steve Trubilla donated a scanner/copier.
They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and preserve.
Now they're caught in a disaster situation without a backup. (I'm not disappointed with people doing this, I'm sure they did what they could / thought was important at the time. Just the whole situation is depressing. It's like almost every single "we lost all our data" story out there.)
Franklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural historical societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant archival tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans, and older folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner suggests the sophistication of the organization.
From the article, it sounds as if they were trying to follow sound archival practices - e.g. contacting the State Bureau. There was no reason for them to know they were in a race against the clock, and it is absurd to propose that they should have acted in such a way or to violated sound archival practice.
> Franklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural historical societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant archival tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans, and older folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner suggests the sophistication of the organization.
This is absolutely the typical case. Archiving various kinds of documents is hard. Professional archivists generally have a Masters degree in Library Science or a similar field. When there are many kinds of records (paper, photo, etc) it is difficult to start the process and handle things correctly.
In this case, it appears that a portion of the documents were in an unstable condition and thus, there was good reason to focus first on preservation over reproduction, dissemination, and interpretation.
> They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and preserve.
They were probably worried about damaging the books or pages. They had no idea of what was coming, so why would they damage their newfound discovery just to make a bad copy?
(Usually, backup stories are good morality plays because the only cost of backup are time and money; but if you had a 0.01% chance of corrupting both copies of a file every time you copied it over to the backup drive...)
* Late May, early June, 2013 – Work began, using a few volunteers,...
* August 5, 2013 ... A request was made to The United Way to supply the Society with computers and Steve Trubilla donated a scanner/copier.
They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and preserve.
Now they're caught in a disaster situation without a backup. (I'm not disappointed with people doing this, I'm sure they did what they could / thought was important at the time. Just the whole situation is depressing. It's like almost every single "we lost all our data" story out there.)