"When Peter the Great visited Westminster Hall; he asked who were all those men in wigs and gowns. He was told that they were lawyers. 'There are but two lawyers in all my dominions, and I am going to hang one of them as soon as I get home.'" (punctuation added)
Deseret News, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 7.
It seems that lawyers have not waned in "popularity" over the last 150 years. I guess that this could be considered the first "funnies" in the Deseret News.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Preserving for the future
A paper that is worth printing, is worth preserving; if worth preserving, it is worth binding; for this purpose we issue in pamphlet form and if every subscriber shall preserve each copy of the "News" and bind it at the close of the volume, their children's children mayread the doings of their father's which otherwise might have been forgotten; ages to come.
- Willard Richards, "Prospectus" Deseret News Vol. 1 No. 1 p. 1
This paragraph is on the first page of the first issue of the Deseret News. As far as a preservationist point of view it has a very futuristic feel to the verbiage but the wording and the "who" I found to be even more interesting. It calls upon the subscriber to take pains to preserve the paper, not the Newspaper itself. It knew they would not be perfect but it also knew that in duplication and distribution the preservation of "...the doings of their fathers..." could be preserved. This was more than 100 years before Microform dissemination of newspapers became a common practice in getting back issues of newspapers into the libraries of the world. It is also more than 150 years before digital images of article text would not only become available, but commonplace. After all, I am viewing the digital version of this newspaper to do this blog. Could they have foreseen this?
Even Utah, by this standard and after this admonition, did not begin preserving their records very well for another fifty years and that after some cultural growth from a bare subsistence focus to a society working to break out of the "frontier" culture and into the mainstream of the west. It was around that time (1894) that the Genealogical Society of Utah was founded which has been one of the models for archiving, distribution, and development of record preservation in the world. Even they did not begin for another forty-four years.
So what could be the lesson, the moral of the story? Write it down, write it down again, and then later the same day when you have some time, write it down again. Hopefully one of them will make it to tomorrow.
- Willard Richards, "Prospectus" Deseret News Vol. 1 No. 1 p. 1
This paragraph is on the first page of the first issue of the Deseret News. As far as a preservationist point of view it has a very futuristic feel to the verbiage but the wording and the "who" I found to be even more interesting. It calls upon the subscriber to take pains to preserve the paper, not the Newspaper itself. It knew they would not be perfect but it also knew that in duplication and distribution the preservation of "...the doings of their fathers..." could be preserved. This was more than 100 years before Microform dissemination of newspapers became a common practice in getting back issues of newspapers into the libraries of the world. It is also more than 150 years before digital images of article text would not only become available, but commonplace. After all, I am viewing the digital version of this newspaper to do this blog. Could they have foreseen this?
Even Utah, by this standard and after this admonition, did not begin preserving their records very well for another fifty years and that after some cultural growth from a bare subsistence focus to a society working to break out of the "frontier" culture and into the mainstream of the west. It was around that time (1894) that the Genealogical Society of Utah was founded which has been one of the models for archiving, distribution, and development of record preservation in the world. Even they did not begin for another forty-four years.
So what could be the lesson, the moral of the story? Write it down, write it down again, and then later the same day when you have some time, write it down again. Hopefully one of them will make it to tomorrow.
This blog is...
I am a genealogist by nature and before you fall asleep let me just say a couple of things about why I am writing this blog and why I hope you find it interesting. Ready?
I have wanted to do a project and so many things in genealogy seem to be taken that I thought I would see where my frustrations with genealogy lie. It didn't take long but it crossed my mind that every time I saw a scanned newspaper, so many of the indexes extracted from them were terrible. Many were so irrelevant that I spent most of my time sorting through the terrible indexes only to find the names I was looking for was not a name at all, or pieces of two different names. I am sure some of you can identify with that.
Considering that there are now thousands of newspapers now online and some of them only in part, I thought better indexing would be a good project to work on. If I indexed from the newspaper with my own two eyes, I think I would have a vastly superior product than the OCR indexes. OCR or Optical Character Recognition may read the text but no matter how good you get, it cannot adequately "reason" what it reads and categorize the information it finds. That is how you get search "hits" from a search looking for "John Smith" and you get a hit on a line of text reading "...Matthews, James Madsen, Henry Smith, John Smedshammer..." The computer thought that was a match. However, you, at a glance can see it is not a match and there you have it -- the first big problem and frustration I have had with OCR. However, if an index was created by a reasonalbly good looking and reasonably well-educated human reading, reasoning, and interpreting, it would have fewer errors in it.
OK so that is what I am doing. So why the blog?
I expect to come across a lot of wisdom, knowledge, cultural tidbits, and stories that explain the myth of the 19th Century LDS culture in Utah. I like to muse on what I read and so I want to write a blog on my musings. Gimme a chance. I like writing humorously, not unlike Dave Barry and hope to draw such an interest.
I love feedback as well so feel free to post comments as you like. Good and bad, just not vulgar please. Leave the swearing to my kids who are learning new ones at school everyday.
I really feel that our future can be found in our history as those who are the most steady in their lives are those who have a firm grasp on who they are and where they have come from. I look to find it there, in the past, so I can have a brighter future.
I have wanted to do a project and so many things in genealogy seem to be taken that I thought I would see where my frustrations with genealogy lie. It didn't take long but it crossed my mind that every time I saw a scanned newspaper, so many of the indexes extracted from them were terrible. Many were so irrelevant that I spent most of my time sorting through the terrible indexes only to find the names I was looking for was not a name at all, or pieces of two different names. I am sure some of you can identify with that.
Considering that there are now thousands of newspapers now online and some of them only in part, I thought better indexing would be a good project to work on. If I indexed from the newspaper with my own two eyes, I think I would have a vastly superior product than the OCR indexes. OCR or Optical Character Recognition may read the text but no matter how good you get, it cannot adequately "reason" what it reads and categorize the information it finds. That is how you get search "hits" from a search looking for "John Smith" and you get a hit on a line of text reading "...Matthews, James Madsen, Henry Smith, John Smedshammer..." The computer thought that was a match. However, you, at a glance can see it is not a match and there you have it -- the first big problem and frustration I have had with OCR. However, if an index was created by a reasonalbly good looking and reasonably well-educated human reading, reasoning, and interpreting, it would have fewer errors in it.
OK so that is what I am doing. So why the blog?
I expect to come across a lot of wisdom, knowledge, cultural tidbits, and stories that explain the myth of the 19th Century LDS culture in Utah. I like to muse on what I read and so I want to write a blog on my musings. Gimme a chance. I like writing humorously, not unlike Dave Barry and hope to draw such an interest.
I love feedback as well so feel free to post comments as you like. Good and bad, just not vulgar please. Leave the swearing to my kids who are learning new ones at school everyday.
I really feel that our future can be found in our history as those who are the most steady in their lives are those who have a firm grasp on who they are and where they have come from. I look to find it there, in the past, so I can have a brighter future.
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