scan quality

[aoifefahey]

There are quite a few issues with the scan quality.

The first and most obvious is the resolution is poor and monochromatic, which makes it hard to distinguish certain figures, symbols and glyphs. Most of the time these can be inferred (for instance, the ubiquitous 1/2 glyph in the old columns is largely unreadable, but is easy to understand in context.)

A larger issue is that some pages were not scanned properly, and text is cut off on the edges. Here is an example from page 60, where the last column of numbers is cut off from the entire page:

Here is an example from page 68, where the page was poorly aligned and the bottom of the page was cut off.

We can probably recreate this data using Sandborn maps, but if there are any extant copies of the book available it might be worth the time to find which pages are poorly scanned and either scan them, take pictures, or record the missing data.

[gneidhardt]

I can check on Chicago History Museum's holdings when I'm on site on Wednesday. I think that what we have is also a Xerox, but I'm not 100% sure. We do have a copy of an even old handwritten list, which....is a mess. But might be useful for double checking?

[gneidhardt]

I can check on Chicago History Museum's holdings when I'm on site on Wednesday. I think that what we have is also a Xerox, but I'm not 100% sure. We do have a copy of an even old handwritten list, which....is a mess. But might be useful for double checking?

So I checked this morning, and as I thought, the use copy we have is a scan of a type-written list made by the WPA. It looks very similar to the 1911 list, but I'm attaching a few pictures here. I will say that I think it's a little clearer on some of the weird cases, but we can always just use it for reference. I hesitate to promise that we could scan it in our book scanner in a timely fashion - it's 464 pages laid out this way and we're about to lose our photocopy assistant.