Lazy

Today I had only a few hours in the late morning – and tonight I do not have to work: Jausa! I spent the afternoon in the sunny city walking and windowshopping. I should work on some transscriptions, but I do enjoy more to have to do nothing, idling along. And the copies of the documents are of bad quality, too.
Actually they are no copies of the originals. One should handle original materials very careful – and slamming it on a copy-machine does not describe the careful attitude. Organizations always had a problem with records – the material grows too much, takes too much space! So miniaturizing was an idea and the microfiches – which slowly get out of fashion in the digitized world – were invented. Early as the 1940s by the way, Goebbel’s diaries (he had at least two, an official and a semi-private) were micro’d and survived on glass plates. After all it is a photographic kind of process. Later the glass plates were changed to plastic sheets, but basically its all based on silver. Sometimes in the fifties I guess the Americans started to film European medieval sources, manuscripts etc. to have the texts available without moving the books, and the European libraries got copies of these films – it was the 36mm “Kleinbildfilm”.
I have to deal with church books mainly. And because of the interest in genealogy the churches deceided to collect their books in a central archive and give the users films or microfiches. So one uses usually a reader-printer-machine; that’s nothing else but a kind of screen with an optic, different lenses and a simple printing device, where the choosen part drops out after having pushed the button. In some archives the user is allowed to do it himself, in others not.
The quality of the print depends of the quality of the film – it’s the copy of a copy. The material I have to work with now is really bad, because the film is bad: They did not put it plain when they made the photograph. That means that it is only possible to have a part of the sheet sharp and readable, other parts become diffus, blurred.
Normally one puts a kind of unreflective glassplate over a kind of written source. But here they did not. Obviously the bound volume was too large and there must have been a kind of damage, water I guess. Old paper, before 1820, is very strong and stands a lot of impacts. Only the ink can do real harm, if they used a cheap or selfmade one that over time gets acidic. New paper becomes acidid in itself and dissolves over time, a big problem for the archives of any kind. For churchbooks normally good quality was used, but if the volume drowned, there is not much to do about it.
Digitization is another game. Modern scanners work without contact to the object and modern programs can minimize such flaws as mentioned above – even in the middle of a very large book they get very good results without braking the book’s back. But this is a development of the last ten years or so, and it’s used by the libraries for the exceptional manuscripts, books and cimelia. The average run-of-the-mill-church-book-film-copy you get is made in the seventies or eighties by a Netherlandish company without too much care and you are happy when the registers work and you find what you need. After that it is looking glass and patience. And hopefully the handwriting is good and the priest was not too drunk, ill, tired, careless …
By the way it is interesting to see the development of the handwritings. I find that the older ones from the 18th century or 17th are far more individual than the modern ones. And in the 19th you find a kind of unification. That helps a lot regarding the readability and for the registers, but it’s a kind of miss too.
The registers are another capitel. Some are absolutely reliable, others are a waste of time. Best are the Protestant from the 1930s, well … there are family-sheets / trees too. What I very much like to find in a church or parish – if the books are still on location – is the 1930s family-register on cards. That’s a great tool. In the parish always the “Durchschrift”, the copy, was kept. The originals – as I remember from some article about it – went to Berlin. Wonder where they ended.