plan

There are occasional discussions among member of St. Gregory's Episcopal Church about creating permanent archives for our church. The following is a plan prompted by Mary Lou Ricker's reminder at the Ministry Fair. This plan makes the following assumptions.

• Everthing should be digitized because it is not expensive and that enables us to easily have multiple copies . Original documents can also be saved, but this plan does not deal with that.
• We should design an easy and inexpensive way to add items and then add generously.
• Our manner of doing things should allow for future OCR work whereever possible to create digitzed text, but that is beyond the scope of this plan at present. It is imperative that we find a professional OCR service who can help us determine the best image sources for OCR work before we begin digitizing Leslie's clippings.
• Our archives should not be dependant on any particular person's skill or availability. Professional standards must apply.

1. Gathering & digitizing source documents (if not already digital)
   1. paper documents:
      1. page size or smaller to a multi-page pdf file:
      2. large format: each page to a single pdf file:
         1. rectory:
         2. Harris Hall:
         3. original church:
   2. page size or smaller to JPEG image (OK for OCR):
      1. 600 pages in 3 binders: This can be done by Dixie Blueprint in Boca for about $150.
      2. more pages not yet catalogued by Leslie (how many ?):
   3. photo prints (on paper):
      1. Lee Zimmerman (& Howard McCall):
   4. kodachrome negatives:
      1. Lee Zimmerman (& Howard McCall):
   5. slides:
      1. Lee Zimmerman (& Howard McCall):
   6. digital photos:
      1. Lee Zimmerman (& Howard McCall): No cost to StG.
      2. Carl House (1244 images of Haiti by Anita, Andrew, Joani, Scott taken in April 2007): No cost to StG.
2. Catalogue:
   1. Stage I: list of items (probably 5000 items at first attempt from readily available items above). We should budget $150 for professional services and $200 for storage media. Maybe more later.
   2. Stage II: professional style catalogue with advice by Susan Gillis of the Boca Raton Historical Society. We need to learn what database platform has good user interface software for archiving.
   3. Stage III: intitutionalize the catalogue, put it on-line, recruit and train volunteers for improving it.
3. OCR (Optical Character Recognition to convert images to useful text wherever OCR is desired)
4. Making archives available: on-line, publication (many possibilities). Consider privacy !