This week I finished filing all the documents from the Ochs scrapbook and began adding metadata for each item in a .csv spreadsheet. The parameters are the same ones I worked with for the Ambuehl collection, so the process has been fairly straightforward so far.
While working on the metadata, I did some quick google searches to help me learn more about some of the people who created or received these documents, or who are mentioned in the text, so I could create well-informed tags. I learned that Adolph Sr., Milton, and George came from a Jewish family and that Adolph Sr. helped found the Anti Defamation League. George changed his last name to Oakes to distance himself from the reports of German atrocities that came out of WWI. Milton’s other son, who is referred to as “Van” or “Van Dyke” throughout the collection, was William Van Dyke Ochs, who served as an officer in both world wars and worked at the Pentagon following WWII. Van was also commissioned as a lieutenant around the same time as Adolph Jr. but was later promoted to Colonel.
I’m doing my best to decipher who’s who in the collection, but since there are so many Ochs men, it’s often hard to tell which “Mr. Ochs” or “Lt. Ochs” is being referred to. Adolph Jr. often signs his name or is mentioned as simply “A.”
As I look ahead to digitizing these documents, there are a few important aspects to consider. One is that I will have to create PDFs rather than JPEGs, since I’m working with mostly documents instead of photographs. Many of the documents have multiple pages, so I will have to create multipage PDFs for them. Finally, a major concern for digitizing these documents is that most of them are extremely fragile and many are torn or even flaking apart. I will have to be very careful when scanning them to make sure I can capture as much as the document as possible, and to avoid damaging the document even further through careless handling.
