What is records preservation? What are we doing here in Huaraz?

If you are wondering what we do from Monday to Friday, here is a brief summary of what our mission is all about. WARNING, this is a little techie, so you may skip over the text and just look at the pictures if you wish.

Background -

For many years, the LDS Church has been microfilming vital records (basically birth, marriage and death information) around the world to preserve them from loss and deterioration and to help people find their ancestors. With the advent of the Internet, these microfilm records are being digitized (a process called indexing) and put into searchable databases and made available to anyone who wishes to access them. Microfilm has its limits in terms of quality and duration. Digital cameras are now being used worldwide by the Church to continue this work. At present there are over 250 digital cameras in use with many more planned.

In Peru there are cameras, operated mainly by senior missionary couples, in 8 locations with more planned. There are two cameras here in Huaraz, one being operated by Juan Montalván, our trainer, and the one we are using. Since Huaraz is the capital of Ancash Province, there are records here from many towns in the Province. Currently Marilyn and I are working with death records from Chimbote, a large city on the coast, and part of this province.

This is the Regional Archive for Ancash Province. Most of the vital records for the province are stored in the rooms with the white walls, windows and red doors. This is where we work.

 

Here we are in the area where the Provincial President's office is located. A little nicer buildings and grounds than those of the archive.

 The process -

Once an image is taken of a document, it is transferred to the hard drive of special computers than can hold up to two terabytes of data. Each Friday we transfer that data to an external hard drive (see photo below), also with two terabytes of capacity and those hard drives are expressed to Lima in special cases (see photo below) and on to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Once they are reviewed for quality and accuracy, they are made available for indexing and then uploaded to the Church's website, FamilySearch.org. Anyone in the world can access this website at no cost to locate information on their ancestors. The entire process from camera capture to placement on the Internet generally takes 4 - 5 months.

This is the 2 TB external HD.

This is the Pelikan shipping case.

  



The equipment -

The cameras and the lighting are the key elements of the image capture process. We are working with an Illumis 50 megapixel B/W camera and Juan is using a Nikon 800 color camera with 29 megapixels. The Nikon camera is new and they are testing them in the field. Each morning we calibrate these cameras using the books and documents we will be working with that day. Calibration involves, focus, whiteboard, gray scale and LSI adjustments. Once the lights have reached their maximum illumination, about 15-20 minutes, we are ready to go to work. All of this equipment is located in a small room, about 6 ft. by 11 ft., so we are a little cramped.
 

Juan, our trainer, sitting at the camera we normally work with. As you can see, space is at a premium. The archive has said they will remove the metal shelves with the red boxes which will gives us more room.

Juan at his computer. Notice the old, tattered document he is working on.

Working at our camera. This was a particularly dusty volume so we put on the masks. The gloves are in place of rubber fingers to help turn the pages. Our hat and visor help keep the glare from the lights out of our eyes. Likewise, the black paper hanging from above.

We mentioned the lights. Here are the six on our camera when they are turned off and without the black paper glare shield.

This is the light setup on Juan's camera, the Nikon 800 that takes color images. He has also added black paper to cut the glare from the two banks of lights.

This is a typical book that we are working on. These are death records from Chimbote, Peru from 1966 - 1970. Each of these books contains 250 records, one individual on each page.

Our Illumis 50 megapixel camera.

The Nikon 800 29 megapixel camera.

Our workday -

The archives here in Huaraz are open from 8:00 to 1:00 and from 2:30 to 5:00, and we can only be there while they are open. The Peruvians eat their big meal in the middle of the day, thus the long lunch hour. We have eaten out with Juan every day at different local restaurants.  (More on the food in a later post.) There are security guards at the front gate who control entrance to the facility. Sometimes power outages, local holidays and protests (see photo below of one on Thursday, but we were able enter by a different gate) or strikes close the archive or make it so we can't work. Because we are asked to dress like the local archive personnel, you will notice that our work clothing, or Juan's, does not include white shirts and ties, or dresses or skirts. We love this aspect of our assignment.

This was our first full week of production. We took 4,749 images from 19 books. Juan said this was very good for our first week of actual camera work.  He may be gone next week, in which case we will be on our own. Hopefully, we will have a good week with no camera problems or shutdowns.

When we arrived Thursday morning there were several hundred protesters, including these ladies with hats, and two rows of police blocking our entrance. We entered by a different gate. The protesters left after an hour or so.

A view of some of the records that await us in the archives.

These are all tied together with string.

 

               Some nicer, better bound records.