[Ads-l] Quote: There are really no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. (Richard Le Gallienne, April 24, 1991)

[Joel Berson]

Which tells us that one may need to trust only the microfilm.  And one particular microfilm of several.  Or the original paper record.

Vita Brevis has an article on microfilms of early U.S. census returns.  Original returns from the enumerators were copied one or more times,  One copy was sent to the federal government, and that is what appears in the microfilm at the National Archives.  The author, Lindsay Fulton, discusses how to recognize when the federal document is not an exact transcription of the original, and how to locate the original, perhaps at another microfilm source or "at the county".  (She does not say whether paper documents may be available.  And of course those too might be copies of no longer extant originals.)

http://vita-brevis.org/2016/02/game-of-telephone/?utm_source=twgnewsletter&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=twg781 

I've encountered at least two cases where the microfilming in EAN is incorrect. One merges the first two numbers published of the New England Courant into the second number, making it seem that the NEC first published a week later than it actually did.  Another also merges two consecutive numbers (of another newspaper), but omits some pages from each; untangling this requires consulting the paper copy at the Americn Antiquariam Society.

I'm sure others of us have had similar experiences, even dioscounting OCR errors.


Joel
      From: ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2016 11:10 AM
 Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Quote: There are really no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. (Richard Le Gallienne, April 24, 1991)
   
...

Also note that, the OCR text in the online nytimes.com archive
sometimes differs from the OCR text in the "The New York Times"
ProQuest database.

Garson




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