Beacon Street Blog

[]On Thursday, June 21, the Pratt Room was buzzing with talk of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams as Francis Bremer, Professor Emeritus at Millersville University, brought a packed house back to 17th century America. He chided those who would be quick to criticize the Puritans' actions as "morally wrong". Bremer told those of us sitting around the table what he always impressed on his students, that every society sets boundaries for beliefs and behavior. While today's boundaries are much broader, his contemporary example is Mormons being prohibited from practicing polygamy in the United States.

[]Bremer's latest book First Founders: American Puritanism in an Atlantic World deals with some of the lesser known characters in early America. I found the anecdotes that Professor Bremer shared about these characters the most interesting part of our conversation; it gave us the opportunity to see the individuals in the context of a larger world and through the lens of their own cultural.

The lunch audience appreciated Professor Bremer's presentation and, as usual, asked challenging and thought provoking questions that led the discussion deeper into subjects as diverse as the disappearance of original manuscripts to the "laziness" of scholars who depend on second- and third-hand sources for their research.

The Congregational Library is so fortunate to have so many original manuscripts and records from the Puritans and those who followed. Francis Bremer's books, including First Founders: American Puritanism in an Atlantic World and Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction are available to read and borrow at the Congregational Library, and for purchase through many booksellers.

-Cary

If you missed this event and would like to experience a bit of it, there is a video inteview with Francis Bremer on our YouTube channel.

[]The State Library of Massachusetts has digitized their collection of early Massachusetts Registers, and made them available to the public. Spanning the years 1767-1878, these volumes are part almanac, part directory -- phone books before there were phones, if you will. They are a fantastic resource for researchers.

The almanacs are also an invaluable resource on Massachusetts state and city/town elected officials, justices, lawyers, sheriffs, ministers, and officers of various organizations throughout the state; institutions such as schools, churches, and societies; area businesses; soldiers; and military activities. In earlier volumes, it's common (and exciting!) to come across such famous names as John and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Washington, James Bowdoin, and others.

One interesting feature found within the 1862 register is a lengthy section titled "History of the Rebellion and Massachusetts Action", which covers state, legislative and military action, noteworthy men, and the historical events leading up to the beginning and early years of the Civil War through 1862. A substantial part of this section provides a complete account of the Massachusetts Volunteer regiments, including sketches about each regiment and lists of soldiers' names accompanied by the Mass. cities and towns from which they hailed.

Read more on the State Library blog, or go straight to their digital archive and see what you can find.

--Robin

We are pleased to announce a new addition to our collection. The records of Centre Congregational Church in Northbridge, MA are processed and now available to researchers. These records document the history of the church from 1782 to its closure in 2011.

Centre Congregational Church traces its roots back to Northbridge's founding and early history. Its history mirrors Northbridge's agrarian past turn manufacturing power house. The church had three different edifices over the course of its life as well as a strong connection to Rockdale Congregational Church, also in Northbridge.

Here's a highlight of the kinds of concerns Reverend Crane, Centre Congregational Church's longest standing minister, recorded of his congregants two hundred years ago:

I profess to be aggrieved with Brother Joel White and his son Joseph, for their attempts to adulterate cider last Fall, by mixing water with it and selling it for whole cider. This attempt I consider of the nature of fraud.

–Levi Rist, May 13, 1813

Another item of particular interest is Joel Batchelor's Choir Book dated from 1869. It is a beautiful bound book including photographs of choir members and hand written notations of the instruments they played / parts they sang. The ornamentation on the cover is lovely and each page is individually hinged; it is in excellent condition overall.

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It's wonderful to see such clear images of the church's choir members. It's an impressive item for a church in a smaller town, considering photography was invented only about thirty years before the book was created. Most of the photos are cartes de visite; many were taken in various places in Worcester, while some are tinted from Newburyport, MA.

-Cristina

[]As much as we have enjoyed having Megan Wheaton-Book as our administrative assistant for the past year, we are even more pleased to see her move on to bigger things.

After completing her master's degree in Library and Information Science at Simmons College last month, she is beginning her full-time career at (appropriately enough) the Wheaton College library. We are certain that her new coworkers will find her as delightful as we do, and hope that she will keep in touch.

On Friday June 8, the voices of 90 Japanese elementary students rang through the halls of 14 Beacon and into the Library. We are an important stop on their annual pilgrimage to explore the roots of their school, the Doshisha International Academy in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1875 by the first native Japanese Congregational missionary, Niijima Jo (aka Joseph Hardy Neesima), the school traces its beginnings back to the inspiration of missionary Alpheus Hardy, Neesima's mentor and sponsor. Each year their journey takes them all around Massachusetts to Phillips Academy, Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary places where Neesima studied. At the library the young Doshisha students always make a point of having their pictures taken in front of the bust of Hardy in our reading room then pour over the many Neesima artifacts on display in the Pratt Room.

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Doshisha students and teacher with the bust of Alpheus Hardy (upper right)

Each year we look forward to the children’s enthusiasm and welcome them as they steep themselves in an important part of their school's history. Extending their generosity, each class makes a special presentation to Executive Director, Peggy Bendroth. They bring gifts that we treasure, including drawings with personal messages from each student and origami, even a copy the Doshisha College Song, seen below.

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Although their visits are brief, they are definitely one of the highlights of our year.

For more information about the work of the American Commissioners of the Board of Foreign Missions, take a look at the archival finding guide and research guide on our website.

-Cary

[]If you weren't able to attend last month's Brown Bag Lunch lecture with Adrian Weimer about her book, Martyrs' Mirror, you can now get a taste of her talk in video form. Peggy Bendroth sat down with her for a brief interview about the Puritan view of martyrdom, and how it was affected by their interactions with Native Americans.

Keep an eye on this news feed for future video announcements, and take a look at our Program & Workshop Schedule for even more events that you can attend in person. We've got two more Brown Bag Lunches this month, and more events over the summer that will be announced soon.

[]First Founders re-introduces us to the New England Puritans as surprisingly diverse and dynamic group of people. The keenly drawn portraits in Francis Bremer's new book include some familiar figures — John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson — but also some lesser-known but fascinating "strong women" and magistrates, merchants and Native Americans, the orthodox and the not-so-orthodox. First Founders demonstrates the great variety of life throughout colonial New England and traces their influence in the lives of contemporary Americans.

Francis J. Bremer is a distinguished scholar of American Puritanism and Emeritus Professor of History at Millersville State University in Pennsylvania. His many books include John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father and Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction.

Thursday, June 21st
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Join us for lunch at noon.
Program begins promptly at 12:15.

Free.
Register through SurveyMonkey.
 

The past few weeks we have used our space here to highlight some of the collections that have become available for researcher access here at the library. These collections have, for the most part, spanned multiple boxes and represent a fairly detailed documentation of an institution or person. Not all of our archival materials, however, fit this description. In fact, we have quite a few collections which consist of single items, such as a ledger book. I was handed one such item to catalog a few weeks ago.

The book contains the records of a group dubbed the Preacher's and Pastor's Club, formed in 1849. It was kept by member and permanent scribe Henry Martyn Dexter and details the operations, rules, history, and membership of the club.

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According to Dexter's notes, Reverend Stedman Wright Hanks of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Rev. Lyman Whiting of Lawrence, Mass., swapped pulpits for a week in December, 1847. During the course of the day, Mrs. Hanks had occasion to mention to Rev. Whiting the "trials of mind" her husband encountered when writing sermons. After inspecting Rev. Hanks' sermon manuscripts and noting that they showed "a wearying laboriousness in the amount and manner of preparation," Whiting decided to stay on in Lowell until his colleague's return. The resulting discussion lead to the desire "for the mutual help by criticism and other modes" in the preparation of sermons.

Reverends Henry Martyn Dexter of Manchester, New Hampshire, and Leonard Swain of Nashua, New Hampshire, were asked to join them and together the four neighboring pastors formed the Preacher's and Pastor's Club. The group met every other month on the last Monday at various member's homes and parishes and took turns preaching for the group's criticism, reviewing books, discussing homiletic and hermeneutic essays, and offering sermons for the group's discussion. In 1851 the group was joined by Rev. Roswell D. Hitchcock, and the last meeting recorded in the book was held on March 31, 1852.

[]Shown here is a page from the record book detailing the tasks for the group's twentieth meeting. The next page in the book details actual events of said meeting, and is transcribed below:

P.P.C met at the study of Bro: Swain at the hour appointed. Present Hawks, Swain and Dexter. Dexter having been Providentially hindered from finishing a Review upon which he was engaged read in place thereof, a sermon upon the "Testimony of observation in reference to the moral quality of human nature".

Hawks read a Hermeneutic Essay upon Genesis 27:22. "The voice is Jacob's voice but the hands are the hands of Esau."

After dinner a pleasant hour was spent in religious communion, and as Bro: Hawks was obliged to leave – and all our members were not present, it was voted to adjourn two months.

--Sari

Storage Cases of the Past

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When unpacking an historic collection at the Congregational Library, we never know exactly what we'll find. Not only are the documents themselves often fragile, beautiful, and fascinating, but so are their storage cases. They too, sometimes in intangible ways, tell us something about the material culture of a time period. It's interesting to see what's valued in a certain era — how much effort is put into wrapping, ornamental detail work, bookplates, as well as clever design and packaging. Equally interesting is the evident shift to strictly utilitarian storage containers in the 20th century.

Here are a few quick examples of historic storage containers we've received as part of new accessions to our archive. Notice anything familiar from your own collections? Included are:

• Metal boxes, one from 1877 that's painted and lacquered (complete with beautiful keys)
• Wooden lantern slide boxes
• Plastic floppy disk case
• Various kinds of cardboard and wooden cases

During the course of processing these collections and making their finding aids available on our website, we'll rehouse the documents and retire these storage containers. We do this because the majority of storage cases are not archival — meaning, at minimum, they are not acid-free and over a long period of time they become inhospitable to the items they contain. Beyond that, any wooden or late 19th- or 20th-century paper-based storage container also contains lignin**, a chemical compound found in wood that makes the items it contains yellow and brittle (think of old newspaper print) as it biodegrades. We'll also rehouse documents that come to us in plastic containers because as plastic degrades, it gives off gases and is often chemically deleterious to documents in its vicinity.

These are just a few of the easy steps you too can take with your own collections or personal papers to help them endure as long as possible. Nothing is made to last forever. While we can't stop the aging process entirely, we can help slow it down considerable by removing historic items from chemically hostile storage containers and providing more neutral enclosures for them.

-Cristina

** Fun fact: Lignin breakdown is also what gives old books their distinctive vanilla-like smell.

We here at the Congregational Library are a well-dressed group of people, as were the librarians who came before us (remember Miss Emma White?), and if our image collection is anything to go by, Congregationalists have, traditionally, been a rather dapper group. We here at the library were reminded of this fact last week when a routine inventorying of our collection lead us to a white leather glove which supposedly once belonged to Rev. James Diman (1707-1788) (although we doubt the veracity of this claim). Naturally, this discovery sparked some discussion amongst the staff — and then someone said the magic words: "It could go with our hats!"

...Hats?

[]Yes, hats. And what hats they are! Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the origin of these hats (Why do we have them? Did they once belong to someone important? Were they just left in the building and given to us as the natural resting place for such things?), but we do know that they are from Collins & Fairbanks Co., purveyors of young men's hats, gloves, and canes, located at 383 Washington Street here in Boston. We also know that, being top hats, they're super cool. We hope you think so too!

-Sari

[]We are pleased to announce a new addition to our collection! The First Congregational Church of Haverhill, MA records have been processed and are now available to researchers. These records document the history of the church and its various iterations from 1859 to 2012.

First Congregational Church traces its roots back to the 17th-century First Parish in Haverhill. Its building was constructed in 1859, when it was named North Church, and boasted beautiful Tiffany stained glass memorial windows installed at the beginning of the 20th century. Overall, this collection offers considerable insight into the changing nature of the church and the city of Haverhill in the 19th and 20th centuries.

-Cristina

We're in search of a new part-time Administrative Assistant to join us in June. This position covers a variety of tasks including publicity, donor support, event coordination, records management, and more. See the full job description on our website for details and contact information.

UPDATE: Submissions are now closed.

Evelyn Marston Vrandenburg, 1908-2000

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Evelyn Marston at UNH

Evelyn Vrandenburg (nee Marston) was born in New Hampshire Lakes District in 1908. She earned a degree from the University of New Hampshire in history and went on to teach high school history in Laconia, New Hampshire. She continued her education with classes at Tufts University in theology and religion and, upon her employment at the library, at Simmons College for classes in cataloging and reference. Mrs. Vrandenburg also taught religious education in public schools in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. She joined the staff in 1962 as Assistant and Associate Librarian. In 1971 she was promoted to replace Rev. Dwight Cart as head librarian. Mrs. Vradenburg's interest in history served her well while working at the library. She was known as an expert reference librarian. Her retirement from the library marked the end of her professional career. Mrs. Vrandenburg enjoyed another 23 years before dying of heart failure in 2000.

-Sari

[]Had enough of the Freedom Trail and Fenway Park? Here is an entirely new way to see New England, following some of its roads less traveled into some surprising encounters with its spiritual past. Garth Rosell, professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has put together a wonderfully informative handbook — complete with maps, easy-to-follow directions, helpful commentary, and many beautiful pictures — that should be a staple of your summer vacation plans. The day trips are great for families, with plenty to interest both children and adults.

Ever wonder where Cotton Mather preached? Or are you interested in seeing the crypt of George Whitefield, the most famous preacher of the eighteenth century? Rosell's tours will also take you through the back streets of Salem and the home turf of Jonathan Edwards in the Connecticut River Valley. You can see the docks where the first missionaries left for India in 1812 and visit the Northfield, Massachusetts, home of the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

Come learn more about these trips from the author — and pick up a copy of the book at the same time.

Wednesday, June 13th
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Join us for lunch at noon.
Program begins promptly at 12:15.

Free.
Register through SurveyMonkey.

[]With the cost of periodical database subscriptions rising every year, more and more organizations are moving toward open access methods of publishing scholarly research online. Since these free-to-read journals aren't indexed in subscription-based services like JSTOR, the Directory of Open Access Journals was created to serve a similar function in the open access world.

As of this month, the DOAJ includes listings from over 7600 journals containing almost 800,000 articles, and more than half are searchable at the article level. The journals included in the directory meet strict criteria for peer-review, research content, and accessibility. Some are Creative Commons licensed, and many are open to submission. The titles in the index cover all manner of scholarly subjects, in many languages and published around the world, but of particular interest to our readers will be the 80+ publications on religion and more than 200 on history.

There are titles published in dozens of languages, from Afrikaans to Hungarian, Indonesian to Persian to Japanese. The site itself is viewable in English, French, Greek, and Turkish. It is hosted by the Lund University Libraries in Sweden, with support from a number of European and North American partners.

There is still plenty of time to register for our church librarians workshop this weekend. Don't miss out.

Cultivating Your Church Library

Are you planning to start a library at your church? Do you already have one, but want to make it even better and encourage more parishioners to use it? Join our head librarian Claudette Newhall for a discussion with other local church librarians, sharing ideas about electronic resources, creating good collections, and building greater visibility.

Wellesley Hills Congregational Church
207 Washington Street
Wellesley, MA 02481

Saturday, May 12th
10:00 am - 12:00 pm

$15, includes supplementary materials and morning coffee
Register through SurveyMonkey.

It's almost the end of the semester, so I've had Dan and Veronica sum up their experience. These will be the last two official interns on this project, which started in the winter of 2010. There's been a total of 11 interns including this semester, which is the most ambitious internship project I've ever been involved in. Veronica has volunteered to continue working this summer to get things ship-shape.
-Jessica

As our time at the Old South Church comes to a conclusion, we have made considerable progress in the collection. We have reorganized the different series into a working collection in which relevant material can be located for future use. With the assistance of a spreadsheet that illustrates the contents of each box, specific documents can be retrieved easily and efficiently. The shelves have been organized by color-coded series that allows for general items to be effortlessly browsed through. The next step in the process is the creation of a refined finding aid under the guidelines of DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), which Veronica will do this summer.

Some things that we found particularly interesting is the vast amount of outreach work the Old South Church conducted both in the United States and globally.  It is important that this information not be forgotten but preserved in an archive to serve as a great example of humanitarian work. The Old South Church's inclusiveness is also well documented and serves as a great example of community support to all groups. This experience has provided us the opportunity to gain valuable archival knowledge while at the same time assisting with a very important project.

~Dan and Veronica

Lately, I've been working with documents from a Congregational church that recently closed. Their organizational materials were deposited in our archives to preserve their written record and aid scholars in future research. While working with 19th c. documents it's not uncommon to come across water damage, red rot, a lot of dirt and grime accumulated over the years, and an occasional dead bug or two. Items come to the Congregational Library in various states of condition from pristine to damaged beyond repair. However, in terms of scope, they are often edited in their own way because someone had to painstakingly write or type each word. []It's in the 20th century when various copying possibilities come into play (onion skin, mimeograph, photocopies, etc.) that one often sees an explosion of paper in institutional records. The amount of paper to deal with can be staggering.

Making copies became so easy and inexpensive; there seemed no reason not to make them. And dutiful church staff and volunteers have filed them with care for decades. This means that when taking stock of your own institution's records, you can be sure there are multiple copies of the same documents. This takes unnecessary space in your facility and it is no doubt causing a certain amount of consternation for whoever stewards the collection.

Culling multiple copies of the same item is one of the easiest ways to get your arms around your collection. Start by grabbing this low hanging fruit! By doing so, you'll reduce the number of records in your stewardship as well as make more space in your facility for future records of import. Here are some tips:

• Try whenever possible to save the original rather than a copy.
• Save a copy with a damaged original if the copy is in better condition and you can't part with the original.
• If you have multiple copies, choose the one that's in the best condition / has the least number of fasteners on it.

This is a great opportunity to consider your records management policies. Does your church have a policy where you save a certain number copies of vital records? If not, maybe it's a good time to create one. What's the right number of copies for your church to keep... 1, 3, 5? If you're a member of an active church, maybe there's a good need to have multiple copies of vital records, but if your church is closing, there most likely is not.

To make things as easy as possible for you, use the Congregational Library's resources for creating records management policies and schedule templates. If you have specific questions, don't forget to contact us directly!

Culling multiple copies from your collection is a great way to reduce the items in your stewardship and tackle some needed records management in the process. Once that is done, you can hopefully use the momentum to organize other documents. It's an opportunity to let some items go, feel good about it in the process, and move on to the next task!

-Cristina

[]A while ago, we received a comment on our Facebook page from Pastor Joelson Gomes* containing a link to his blog, Congregacionalismo. Pastor Gomes provides a wealth of information about the history of Congregationalism in the Americas, and Brazil in particular. I don't read or speak Portuguese, but with a little help from Google Translate it quickly became clear that his work is thorough and thoughtful. Much like this blog, he shares articles on Congregational history, biographical sketches of historical figures, and reviews of publications.

Because so much of Central and South America was conquered by Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the 1500s, I tend to think of those regions as being primarily Roman Catholic (which they still are today). But they were also heavily influenced by 19th- and 20th-century Protestant missionaries, including Scottish Presbyterian evangelist and physician Robert Reid Kalley, and a number of German Congregationalists who emigrated to South America by way of Russia.

If you're interested in any of the topics mentioned above, Congregacionalismo is well worth a look.

--Robin

* Joelson Gomes is an ordained Congregational minister, a member of the Congregational Alliance of Brazil, and an instructor at the Seminário Teológico Evangélico Congregacional (STEC) in João Pessoa.

Here at the Congregational Library, we're pretty proud of our archival collections. Original manuscripts are a fantastic source of information. When a researcher exhausts our resources, though, we can often help them find their next port of call. One of our first stops is usually WorldCat, a massive union catalog hosted by OCLC. Now they've created an archive-specific search interface called ArchiveGrid.

[]ArchiveGrid connects you with primary source material held in archives, special collections, and manuscript collections around the world. You will find historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. ArchiveGrid also helps researchers contact archives to request information, arrange a visit, and order copies.

ArchiveGrid includes collection descriptions from WorldCat bibliographic records and from finding aids harvested from ArchiveGrid contributors' websites. If you have questions about your collection descriptions in ArchiveGrid, please get in touch with us. Interested in contributing? Please let us know that as well.

We haven't submitted our records to WorldCat or ArchiveGrid yet, because we're still in the process of adding those records to our own catalog, but it's certainly something we're considering for the future. If you'd like to see what other archives have to offer, head on over and take a look.

[]Historians and genealogists take note: If your research takes you across the pond, or if you're already in the United Kingdom, this database might be a great next step.

The Archives Hub has aggregated archival finding guides to primary source materials from almost 200 institutions across England, Scotland, and Wales. The collections represented by these guides include records from individual churches and personal papers (much like our own archival holdings), as well as materials from every discipline from Anthropology to Zoology.

The Archives Hub isn't a digital repository, so you will need to follow the links in any interesting records you find to the collections' holding institutions in order to inquire about getting copies or visiting in person. However, it does provide a much more specific search than a generic search engine that returns results from the entire internet.

For more details, take a look at their Using the Hub and Frequently Asked Questions pages.

[]How did the New England Puritans think about themselves? Today many people remember them for intolerance — for witch-burning and bloody conflicts with Native Americans. Yet, as Adrian Weimer argues in her important new book, Martyrs' Mirror, the Puritans actually believed they were a beleaguered minority. They traced their identity to the persecution and suffering endured under Mary Queen of Scots, and saw themselves as martyrs following a painful path to godliness.

Weimer's research helps explain Puritan attitudes toward Quakers, Baptists, and especially Native Americans, and it opens up a whole new round of conversation about this endlessly fascinating time in American history. Please join us for lunch, a brief presentation, and an open discussion with the author.

Adrian Weimer is assistant professor of history at Providence College.

Wednesday, May 9th
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Join us for lunch at noon.
Program begins promptly at 12:15.

Free.
Registration required.

For the past few months, I've been adding new entries to our necrology index database from a series of books called Biographical sketches of the Congregational pastors of New England by Emerson Davis.This five-volume set contains brief histories of both the churches and the ministers from the first British settlements in New England through the mid-19th century. They are a unique resource that has proven invaluable to historians and genealogists alike. Now that they are part of our database, finding the information you're looking for is even easier.

These books were never published. In fact, the bound copies that we sent to be digitized are typewritten transcriptions of Davis's handwritten notes. Because they weren't intended for public consumption, some of the biographies contained in these volumes are surprisingly juicy. There are accounts of ministers dismissed from churches over everything from salary disputes to intemperance (i.e. drunkenness) to "violating the 7th Commandment" (adultery). There are also many gruesome tales of clergymen dying after falling from their horses or defending early settlements against Indian attacks.

[]Of course, Davis also included reports of glowing admiration, especially for esteemed ministers like the Mathers, Whitfield, and Edwards. However, the vast majority of the biographical sketches are just that -- brief sketches of the ministers' religious service and education, and sometimes their families.

The trickiest part of the process emerged from the fact that so many ministers' sons followed in their fathers' footsteps. Like today, children in the 17th and 18th centuries were often named for their parents or other family members. Combine those two factors, and you end up with three different people named Rev. Phillips Payson, or four named Rev. John Whiting, or six named Rev. John Cotton. (The famous one is John Sr., if you're looking for information about him.) In order to keep the various individuals straight, I ended up drawing several family trees and checking off the names as I added them to the database. I also gave them numbers in the suffix field (Sr., Jr., III, IV, etc.) in order to make parental lines clearer.

The listings from these volumes brings our grand total of entries in the database to just over 29,300 and expands its scope back to the early 1600s. If you're looking for information about a Congregational minister or missionary, it's a pretty good place to start.

--Robin

This is a term that you may have heard of. Until we started with our big project to digitize select Massachusetts church records, it was a very nebulous concept. Basically, metadata is data about materials that contain data -- catalog records for books, database entries for journal articles, descriptions of photographs, that sort of thing. If you are planning a big digital project, this is a concept you will definitely need to get comfortable knowing about. 

If you have 5 minutes, I recommend watching this YouTube video that gives a nice overview and some examples.

Ok, did you go watch it? Cool. Now what does that mean for us when we do our digital projects? I'm glad you asked. 

When we go to get church records scanned, what we get back is an external drive that's filled with image files in TIF and JPG form and a PDF version of each multi-page document. But what we see when we open the hard drive menu is possibly something like: "Middleboro_v01_01".

Does that tell me anything about what that image captured? Not a clue. What we need to know is: What's on that page? Is it a baptismal record? Minutes of a committee meeting? Membership lists? What dates does the information on that page span? Is there any other major information that might help a researcher decide if he or she wants to look at that page more? There might be a reference to a church member's name, the minister or leadership's names, there may not be. Then each project will have a lot of the same metadata: when was it created, by whom, with what equipment, at what settings, the major bibliographic points for the original collection (city of origin, year span, etc.).

Sometimes this material can be generated very quickly, especially if it's relatively modern and typed. "OCR" or Optical Character Recognition can be applied in those situations and then it's a matter of proofreading the data the computer created to make sure that "m" is "m" and not "n". When we deal with hand-written documents that are hundred(s) of years old with possible water damage, page damage, ink bleed-through, paper that has darkened, and/or ink that has lightened, then you have to rely on reliable staff to guarantee that what you've written down is complete and accurate. And this doesn't even cover the notion of transcription.

This, my friends, is one of the major reasons why digital projects are so expensive. It's all about the people-power. So, when you hear that our own Robin has been in the midst of documenting one of the most complicated metadata projects we've ever had to deal with, I hope you'll feel a big pang of sympathy. Possibly if you see her, you'll ply her with chocolate. Or whiskey. Or both. 

A hat-tip to my father, Alan, for pointing me to the video.

-Jessica