We were so happy with how the automatic text recognition worked on the 1971 history book I went back and did a pass over the 1921 Gutteridge book. It, also, worked pretty well and I have uploaded the book with the text.

For those who don’t know what I’m yabbering about, the documents we are making available online are “scanned” pages, essentially pictures of each page all bound together in a single file (the PDF file). Your computer only knows that there are umpteen of these images (which it calls pages) but nothing else. The fact that there is text on them or not is irrelevant. But with some extra work we can instruct a program to “read” these pages and try to locate the text on it and turn it into words that the computer can understand. This is a task that in recent years has become pretty reliable for printed materials (handwritten work or poorly typed pages is typically unusable). This is what we did to the 1921 Gutteridge PDF file and now you can search for words, names, etc. within it — not just flip through pages. The process is far from perfect, but we’re seeing a high enough level of accuracy to make it available to the public. This makes the file much more useful for research.

So, for anyone who downloaded the book prior to today (18-Mar-2010) please download it again to get the updated version with the searchable text:

History of Maynard – 1921 – WIlliam Gutteridge

We’ve just completed the digitization of nearly 40 video tapes in our collection.   The majority of these are recordings of various Society programs, but some document interesting events from our town’s history.

If you have a videotape of historically significant event / subject / person related to Maynard, please let us know about it and consider letting us make a digital copy of it for our archives.

Eventually we plan to make these videos, like everything else in the collection, available for everyone to view — but that might take awhile.

If any of our readers had visited the Society in the past 10 years or so while we were still in the lower level of Maynard Town Hall you might have noticed some fairly large wooden structures tucked in the corner collecting dust.  These were pieces of a loom that came from a Fairfield Street house and was used to make carpets at the turn of the 20th century.   Since we acquired this piece we’ve never had the room to assemble it — until last week…

During one of our Wednesday morning work sessions Len Palmer, Paul Boothroyd and I brought a bunch of pieces out to a work area and we took our shot at putting it together.  We didn’t think we’d get it right on the first shot (and we had a couple of small errors along the way) but we think we have an accurate reconstruction.

Today I spent some times working on the heddles.    If I’ve counted properly the loom is set up for 88 warp threads.  Untangling them after a decade of storage and at least 3 moves took a bit of time.

We are looking forward to having some folks familiar with looms and weaving help us with the next stages.

We’re going to do a light cleaning of the loom to remove (or mitigate) some mildew and dirt.  The loom needs some wedges to secure the major elements.  The weaver’s seat is also missing and we’ll likely cajole a local craftsman into building a replica.

Sometime next year we hope to load some warp threads on the loom and perhaps start weaving some cloth on it, perhaps, for the first time in 90 or 100 years.  When we do so, we’ll be sure to make a video of the process and share it with everyone.