One thing I’m continuing to relearn with more time doing field work is to not celebrate until the data is in hand (and you get to take them home). The excitement and thrill (seriously, no sarcasm here) of the chase though, especially, when the data are actually in one’s hand makes it sometimes hard to temper excitement.
All those caveats aside, I am willing (perhaps foolishly) to say that I think I finally struck gold! As always, caramba was it ever an adventure to find it! Here’s what happened….
So this morning I started hitting the pavement again…one organization…two organization…cross several highways in the blistering sun…the usual. Third organization, I arrive at, and had been told their library was a bit of a mess and that the photos were still in a box…..
A bit of a mess? In a box? I guess that describes the situation somewhat. While finding the boxes of photos themselves was actually pretty easy, discerning which photos out of the tens of thousands they have was a completely different story. Why this archive was in such disarray is a long story, basically one organization disintegrated and was reconstituted, several times over. Fortunately, unlike the archive yesterday, this librarian was very helpful. Unfortunately, like the archive yesterday, she had absolutely no clue about how the photos were organized, and more importantly where the photo indices were that are the key to being able to find the specific photos you’re looking for. So I’m going through box after box, ogling at the unbelievable beautiful (from a remote sensing dork perspective) photos of the Amazon. But quickly I realize these boxes only contain the actual photos and not the indices…they are way too small to contain the indices, which based on my past experience were the size of a place-mat for a dinner table.
So I shift gears, and start looking for big boxes…but all the big boxes just have books. As I’m literally turning around in defeat to tell the librarian that this pile of boxes is useless without a photo index…..something catches my eye!
How I happened to glance INSIDE the specific role I have no idea…must have been fate, or perhaps the gods of research thinking I’ve passed enough gauntlets. Without even opening it up I new that this massive 4 foot long roll contained the indices-the key to finding the actual photos….
Excited like a little school boy I ran to the librarian and told her I found it! To her credit, she was actually very excited and rushed over with me to examine the treasure. After uncovering a desk, we unrolled the massive set of indices…and lo and behold after several minutes of looking through them I had a realization: these were photos from the same mission as I had seen the day before. Now why is this important? Well, this librarian was incredibly helpful, and grateful that I had essentially turned this giant pile of boxes into the valuable resource that it is; although they didn’t have a scanner there, she said next week, on the one day I’m back in Belem, she’ll go with me to a professional copy center, and we can make copies of all the photos I need! Now, I asked the question I’ve learned to cringe at here: do I need formal authorization.
“I am the formal authorization”. As the head librarian her word is hopefully as good as gold.
So tomorrow, at an absolutely obscene hour that I dare not even mention, I’ll fly on down Maraba, arriving there at the essentially same obscene hour. After trying to visit a few more organizations there, I’ll head down to my field site. Now, as I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone by phone or email…I have no idea whether they know I’m coming or not…..oh well, here it goes.
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