January 12. The scanning equipment came in.
Two flatbeds and one with an automatic feeder. The feeder is for loose sheets only; anything bound has to go on the flatbed a page at a time. Old material has gone brittle and the feeder tears it.
Using it is simple. Lay the paper on the glass, close the lid, press the button. A light goes across once and the page comes up on the screen. Check it, and if it is fine, save and go to the next. About fifteen seconds a page.
In the morning I handled the rest of audit's. Nineteen of the twenty-two boxes have come and three are left. Files from the repository are already photographed, so I only open them, count pages and register. Counting them, you wonder what equipment someone used back then. Some files are slightly tilted; on some the tip of a finger is photographed in the top margin. Whoever took them, they laid each page down and pressed too.
In the afternoon I opened the box.
I started with the four bundles. The lighthouse log first. The paper is thin, so the lid has to come down carefully. Lay a page, close, press, look at the screen, save, next page. The same motion repeated and the hand learned it before I did. After two hours it went round without thinking.
The lighthouse log ran to a hundred and eighteen pages. Halfway through, the content started coming through. The hour the water came in and the hour it went out were set down day by day, with the day's events briefly between them. The record of a man alone in a lighthouse. Weather, boats, cleaning the lamp glass. Then from some point the tide entries got longer. That the water comes in more than expected, for several days running.
I had not laid them down in order to read them, so I kept going. Still, the eye reads as it passes. Handwriting reads better on paper than on a screen.
I came to the last page. The one where the sentence breaks off. Lay it, close, press. The light went across and it came up on the screen.
I looked at the screen to check it.
There was one stroke after the last character of the broken sentence.
I looked at the original. Not there. On the paper the writing ended and there was margin. I looked at the screen again. There. I enlarged it. A short vertical. Too straight for grit and too ambiguous to be part of a character.
I wiped the glass and scanned again. The second file had it too. The same stroke in the same place.
I thought about ringing the computer room and did not. Ask about a thing like this and one of two answers comes back. Wipe the glass, or a fold is shadowing. I had wiped the glass already and the paper is not folded there. And a third answer did not seem likely either.
I put a line in the log as a note and moved on. Scanning is copying an original as it is, and if something not in the original is in the file, that is an equipment matter. Equipment matters are for the equipment people. I got on with my work.
I do not use the word copying over for this work. Scanning is not moving, it is photographing. The paper stays and one more photograph exists. Moving is the word for a thing that leaves where it was and goes elsewhere. And yet, looking at the lighthouse log's files in the list, for a moment it is unclear which is the original. The paper is in a box and what comes up on the screen is the file, so anyone looking for this from now on will look at the file.
I went on to the survey log. This one is more brittle. Dense with numbers. It looks like measurements of the depth of a shaft, and the same place is measured over and over. Each time the figure is a little larger. I took it for a record of measurement error. Measuring several times and averaging is common enough.
Only, for error, it grew in one direction.
I saw that in passing too and did not think about it long. Lay, close, press, save, next.
The wrist ache is the lid. Thin paper means lowering the lid slowly, and lowering it slowly means holding the wrist tense. Do that two hundred times a day and by evening the wrist is stiff.
At about four my wrist hurt and I stopped for a while. By then more than two hundred files were saved. I opened the file list and a serial had been attached automatically after the archive code. Paper that had no registration number until yesterday had numbers within a day.
Once there are numbers there are lookups. Once there are lookups there are requests. Once there are requests the files go to other departments' screens. As paper, these bundles went nowhere out of their box; as files they will not stay put.
I thought about that briefly and let it go. It is not mine to decide but the regulations'. Everything in the archive is subject to scanning in principle, the computer room said, and I was following that.
While resting I turned through the first few pages of the lighthouse file. On screen the impression differs from paper. On paper much of the writing was faint; on screen the contrast is raised and it is sharp. The equipment corrects it automatically, they said. Correction means putting in a darkness the original does not have. That does not breach any regulation. It is a feature, put there to make things readable.
At half past five I stopped at page sixty of the survey log. The rest is tomorrow.
Before leaving I wrote the log. The pages handled today, the estimated completion, and at the end one line of note. A stroke not in the original appeared in the file on the last page of the lighthouse log. Whether to request an equipment check: decide next week.
Having written it, I looked at the line again. Put into a sentence it looks like nothing. It probably is nothing.
I left without switching the screen off. I learned how last week, but I will switch it on tomorrow anyway. Before locking the door I looked round the room once. The box on the desk, and beside it the five bundles in order. The four are half files now and the notebook on top is still paper.
I decided to leave that notebook for last. Laying someone else's log on the glass a page at a time sits a little uneasily, so I put the old ones first and pushed it back.
Coming up the stairs I thought about that last stroke again. Not in the original and in the file. I had heard this afternoon that the equipment puts in darkness, so drawing in a stroke that is not there could be an extension of the same thing. Except that correction darkens what is there and does not draw what is not.
I stopped thinking there. Two hundred pages a day tires the eyes, and tired eyes see what is not there.