Today marks quite a milestone! This is the 1,000th
page digitized at NARA for the CLIRWater project. People often wonder why more
collections are not made available to researchers digitally. It has taken approximately
180 hours to scan these 1,000 documents. The All-American Canal Project Histories
1934-1954 collection is made up of 2 linear feet, and 10 linear inches of
documents. These 1,000 pages are barely one-third of the relatively small
collection. It will likely take another 350-400 hours to complete the
digitization of the documents in this collection. These hours do not
even include the scanning of the over-sized documents mentioned in last week’s
blog post. There are also two additional NARA collections to be scanned for the
CLIRWater project, and each is slightly bigger than the All-American Canal
Project Histories 1934-1954 collection. It takes a considerable amount of costly
labor, as well as specialized equipment and dedicated digital storage, to bring
collections like these to the masses in a digital form. This is precisely why funding for
projects like the CLIRWater project is so precious.
Series: All-American Canal Project Histories,
1948-1954. Record Group 48: Records of the Office of the Secretary of the
Interior, 1826-2009. National Archives Identifier: 2292770