Excerpt, Kings County Mortgage Recordings, ca. 1750. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
The room is dim, the only light coming from candles, or perhaps a nearby window. You pause for a moment and rub your eyes to relieve the strain. Sighing, you shake your cramped hand before dipping your quill into the inkpot and getting back to work. Slowly, you copy the words from an old tome onto new pages, squinting occasionally when the handwriting is hard to make out. You stop every so often to clean your quill, pulling paper fibers out of the nib and removing the dried ink clogging it. The process is slow, tedious, and exhausting.
From their earliest days, bound volumes have been a mixed blessing. On one hand, they emerged in the ancient world as the best technology for mass information storage. The many pages of a book could store more information and do it more efficiently than a scroll. The books themselves were less delicate, and easier to store and transport. Copying them was a problem, however. While printing existed in the medieval era, it involved carving unique plates for each sheet—a costly and labor-intensive method. The alternative was not much better: copying books by hand. Many a medieval monk spent his life laboriously copying books. Things became more efficient with Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type. Industrial techniques for producing paper and mass-manufacturing of bound volumes made record keeping in book form more and more common in the next few centuries.
At a government repository such as the Municipal Archives there is no shortage of books. Ledgers, logbooks, meeting minutes, photographers’ notebooks, books of deeds, court proceedings, atlases, and many other bound volumes can be found in the collections. Some are robust and in good shape; others are delicate or damaged. The books range in size from small notebooks a few inches wide to volumes that can be measured in feet. Ledgers from the New York District Attorney from the late 1800s recently digitized in the Archives’ laboratory weighed as much as 35 lbs. each.
Just as the technology for making books has advanced, so has the technique for copying them. Until about ten years ago, the Municipal Archives used microfilm to reformat books and documents. On an archival level, black and white microfilm is highly stable and lasts indefinitely. However, 35mm film is not ideal for reproduction, especially when it comes to capturing the fine detail in many of the handwritten volumes. At that time, digitization was mainly reserved for photographs, and was done on flatbed scanners. If a patron needed a digital copy of a single page from a small book, it could be scanned; but if the book was a huge ledger, or the patron needed the whole book, it presented a problem.
The Municipal Archives eventually procured an overhead camera system for digitization. Digital medium format cameras offer high resolution with faster capture than scanners, and there are dedicated systems of lenses, supports, and camera bodies for archival reproduction. With this technology, the Archives has been able to expand its digitization operation to include many other materials, among them books. Book digitization began with some of the oldest colonial ledgers, going back to the early days of the colony of New Netherland. The Almshouse ledger collection has also been digitized.
The overhead camera setup, a fully integrated system designed for cultural heritage work. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
Yet books still present a problem. For books that lie open on their own, an overhead camera works well. But what about books that must be held open, or books that can’t lie fully open due to delicate binding? For these, the Archives acquired a “book scanner,” which is not really a scanner at all. It uses a V-shaped cradle to support the book, and a plexiglass platen to hold the book open and keep the pages flat. For imaging, it uses two cameras mounted at ninety-degree angles to the open pages, allowing us to shoot two facing pages simultaneously. Digitizing books tends to be faster, but not as high-resolution, on this setup.
The book scanner, which uses a V-shaped cradle and platen, with two cameras for digitization. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
Currently, the Archives is digitizing the historic Old Town ledgers with grant support from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission. With 189 books to digitize, written at different times, in two languages, and in various conditions, it’s a serious challenge. Some books are translations, with careful handwriting evenly spaced on ruled pages. Others are faint, scribbly handwriting in iron gall ink on brittle paper with fragile bindings. An important piece of the puzzle in digitizing Old Town volumes is choosing the digitization method for each book.
What are the criteria for selecting the method? Is the book in good condition or fragile/damaged? Is the binding intact? How easily will the book lie open? Does the spine “throw up,” or is it too rigid? Is the writing neat and clear, or is it faint or hard to decipher? Do the pages have generous margins, or does the writing run into the gutter of the book?
“Throwing up” refers to the spine of the text block curving inward when the book is open. This allows the pages to lie flatter. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
Damaged books are often better under the overhead camera, because there is less direct contact with the volume. If a book won’t lie open easily, the book scanner with its platen might be better. However, if a book has faint or hard to read text, the overhead camera is a better choice for its higher resolution. Books that have tight margins, with the writing running into the gutter, may be best digitized with the overhead camera, as the corner of the book scanner’s platen may obscure a slim margin near the gutter. However, the gutter can be a problem either way, as the swell from the pages on the other side may obscure it.
This volume, with its odd post and pin binding, presents a challenge for digitization. Having different digitization stations allows us to address the uniqueness of each volume. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
The choice of an imaging method is not always clear. What if a tightly bound book will not stay open on its own, with spidery handwriting that requires the highest resolution? In these cases, a judgement call must be made, and generally the highest possible resolution is chosen.
In this ledger from Brooklyn, the handwriting runs into the gutter of the volume, and the book does not “throw up,” making digitization difficult. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
A transcription ledger, neatly rebound by Archives conservators. Photo by Matt Minor, 2022. NYC Municipal Archives.
Many of the Old Town volumes are originals. Some are transcriptions or translations of older volumes going back to the 1600s. While the work this work can be tedious, the Archives is continuing the tradition of preserving records. Like the court clerks in the 19th Century copying books from two centuries earlier—and indeed, like the medieval Monks copying older texts, our work ensures that the past is not forgotten.
Archival processing and digitization of the Colonial Old Town Records is made possible by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
