Drum roll..........

This will be a blog post more of images than words, partially in keeping with the nature of the subject matter, and partially because it’s more fun to put an emotive entry together in this fashion.

Image A: My feelings right now




After 2 very frustrating months of archive work in which I probably visited around 15 different archives in 3 different Brazilian cities, I feel as elated as Donald (or whoever that duck was in Duck Tales that was always jumping into the treasure vault). The reason:




After a red-eye flight back from Maraba, I was under caffeinated and preparing myself mentally, emotionally, and physically for the let down that I knew was awaiting me at the archive. Although I didn’t write about it in the previous post, the way things were left with the archivist were as follows: there were two options: Option A) she pull some strings and get the IT group to scan the photos I had requested; Option B) if option A) fails take the photos and go to a copy center and get them to scan them. Option A) was certainly preferential from my perspective, but given past institutional experiences here in Brazil, I knew that this request would necessitate this woman making a formal request to not only use the scanner, but to harness the services (time=$$$) of the IT individuals who would manually scan these 100 or so photos. As a result of past experiences, I was preparing myself for option B), which I interpreted as shelling out about 2 hundred dollars on scanning, and spending the data at the local equivalent of kinkos. Not ideal, but par for the course




All of that said. What I found was the following




Which left me much like Howard Carter, who is said to have answered upon being asked what he saw when he first peered into King Tut's tomb. “things, wonderful things”.



The reason. I walked in this morning and my new best friend, sorry Boris, and Jo, handed me a disc, with not only all of the images saved in the highest quality digital format possible, but also organized impeccably and labeled according to film roll, and image number!


Which left me as follows:


(slightly scary, I know)

So comes to a happy end this summer's archive research. I'm about to head off to the airport and back to Fortaleza for a few last days of project work, and then home this weekend!

Is this the end of my love/hate relationship with archival research: far from it. A) the archivist was about as elated as I was with the results of my research, and we had a meeting: given that essentially no-one knows that these photos exist, much less what other series are in dusty folders awaiting discovery, we acknowledged that there is an invaluable resource here for scholars interested in everything from landscape change to municipal planning. For data like this to be inaccessible for an area of as global importance as the Amazon is unthinkable and untenable (I'm on my soapbox if you couldn't tell): our response, to start working on putting together a collaborative multi-organizational research project to create an online cartographic library of these and other similar data. If it ever gets off the ground it will certainly be a multi-year endeavor requiring extensive interorganizational coopertation and agreements not to mention funding and personnel; however, all that said, given the fact it took a very persistent and not-completely-dull geeky doctoral student nearly two years to track down the first of these photos, having them accessible online would be an enormous resource.....in the meantime, back to Duck Tales