Hi Everyone,
This last Monday and Tuesday I have been in Joplin to touch base with Angela Walters of Lost Photos of Joplin and Thad Beeler, Minister of Music at the First Baptist Church in Carthage. It was great meeting them and all of the volunteers at the church that took turns working on the photos. It is impressive what is going on there to save photos from the debris. All of the photos---20,000 and counting--come into the church to be tagged and scanned. They have a good system set up, but when I offered some help, Thad was interested in getting copies of the photos that were brought in from the Houck Storage.
The previous weekend there had been a public showing of those photos in the gym, but not many photos had been claimed. I came down with our copy stand, lights and the help of my sister. We got 362 photos. That doesn't sound like much and it really isn't, but it involved tagging each table with a number---starting with 012 and then breaking down each pile of photos to have stickers on the back and one to photograph with the photo that would later be used for reference. Then a sequence number was added. Example: 012_001_001. The next group of photos would have the middle number change to 002 and would go up for how ever many groups were on the table.
The idea was to help so that images can be posted on the Web. Those photos taken with a camera and high resolution could later be uploaded to our galleries after the owner signed the release. There were plenty of photos that had damage, but also a lot that didn't. We also started doing oversized photos and art and those were so large that an easel was used to mount them on. The largest was 23 1/2 x 35 1/2. The three Epson scanners were donated and I think great for posting to the web, but for our use the copy stand is better. I had a chance to compare the same photo taken at the copy stand and the other from the scanner. At 100% the copy stand has better detail and the scanner is doing what looks like a dust and scratches correction which for restoring is not good.
In October when OPR has our copy run at the main library in Joplin, hopefully there will be plenty of people who were able to retrieve their photos.
Tuesday before we made the 4 hour trip back, we headed to south part of Joplin to see the damage. A lot of the debris has been cleared, except for the large buildings. There are also a lot of new homes going up, but when I talked to one lady whose home was destroyed and she is now living in Branson, she remarked that it is not the same neighborhood. Where once there were houses, duplexes are being built and she had no desire to return.
Yesterday Joplin was in the news because of school starting. There were so many schools destroyed and seeing it first hand leaves you feeling sad.
It is amazing to see how many people are volunteering to help and when you get there, you wish there was more you could do. I look forward to OPR being back in October
Margie
