The Archive Project

[goodgulf]

The Archive Project

Kevin Waterson turned a page and ran the scanner over the book. A couple of mouse clicks later the image was saved and the OCR program was churning away. That OCR processing shouldn't take as long as it did, but the computer was an old one. For that matter the scanner was old, the monitor was old, the mouse was old, even the power bar had seen better days. It was all stuff that should have been tossed out years ago, but the school rarely tossed out computers that weren't actually broken. The older systems were just shifted down the line, going to less and less important projects.

And if there was anything less important than this project then Kevin couldn't begin to name it. Who cared the sport's day results from the fall term of 1923? Or what grades students had achieved on the 1925 Christmas exams? Putting the most recent results on the web, that Kevin could see, but posting results that were decades old, that just didn't make sense to him. It probably didn't make sense to anyone, especially not to the IT people, hence the antiquated equipment that was the only gear available for the project.

Kevin mentally cursed the fact that he was working on the project at all. If Old Murdoch had walked past a few minutes later then he wouldn't have seen a thing. Kevin had almost gotten away clean, Old Murdoch hadn't really seen much, but he had seen enough. Old Murdoch had made a few comments about rules, policies, and how the senior students should be aware of what was and what wasn't permitted, then he asked if Kevin wanted to devote two hours of his Friday evening to the scanning project. Scanning was mindless busy work, but that was better than the mindless nothing of detention.

As he slaved away in a backroom of the library, Kevin had to wonder if he had made the right choice. It was like a prison here, one door leading to main part of the library while the other led to a disused service area. Kevin had glanced down that corridor, but there was nothing interesting there. One door was labelled as unisex washroom, would be convenience if he ever had to go, but also eliminated his one valid excuse to wander back to the main part of the library. Not that he would have lingered there to talk to his chums, but anything to break the routine would be welcome.

The work was just so monotonous. Scan a page, save the image, cue a copy of the image to be converted to a text file, scan another page, save the image, cue a copy to be converted, repeat, repeat, and repeat. The only break in the routine was when the OCR program beeped and asked him to interpret something, but that was rare. Virtually all of the records were hand printed meticulously or were in handwriting that was so concise that it might as well been a printed font.

With the OCR program going so slowly, Kevin was usually 10 or scans ahead. He was 13 ahead when the record book ended. There were still more pages, almost a third of the book, but fanning those pages proved that they were blank. They had reached the end of the term so they had put end to that book so as to start a new one. Kevin placed the scanned book on the "these books are completed" trolley, then went to the "to be scanned" trolley and selected a new book from the middle of the trolley.

The books were normally stored another room on shelf after tightly packed shelf. Almost no one ever bothered looked at them so the librarians were loading a shelf worth of books on the "to be scanned" trolley at a time. Once a shelf was scanned, it was replaced and a new one brought out. At first Kevin had been surprised that there were so many volumes to be scanned, but then he had learnt that several different record books were kept for each term. There were the ones kept by the headmaster, the deputy head, the games masters, each form had its own volume covering academic matters, and even the infirmary had one. Some covers were labelled (such as the games master's one he had finished scanning) but most (like the one he had grabbed) only had the term and year stamped on their spines.

While the first book Kevin had worked through was filled mostly of sport results, this one (from the fall term of 1924) looked completely different. It was a log of some kind, with labelled columns and a list of names running down the side of the ledger.

The columns were labelled student, form, house, date, tar, #, instr, cov, cit, delv, and reason. Those first headings were simple enough to figure out, and the # column was clearly a number sign and a not hashtag, but the rest? The "cit" and "delv" columns had names in them, often the same name and they were never the student's name, so Kevin concluded that they were instructors, but why would as many as two instructors be named on each line? The # column usually had numbers, but sometimes it was left blank or had a dash in it. The "tar" column had either "H" or "R" while the "instr" column had cryptic entries, "H", "C", "S", "B", and "Plim" dominated it. The "reason" column gave a clue; it was filled with entries such as "attitude", "poor performance", "work not done"...

"I see you've finished that volume."

Kevin almost jumped out of his skin.

"Sorry about that." Assistant Head Librarian Arlene Duke chuckled. "It's so quiet back here, I should have knocked or something."

"Um, yeah, I finished that one." Kevin said, pointing to the book he had finished. Kevin closed the book he had been examining and held it up. "I thought I would do this one next. It's not the next in order, but since they're all getting scanned I figured it doesn't matter."

"Almost all of them, and you are right, we're doing them shelf by shelf." Arlene told him. "That way we scan them term by term, at least as far as that shelf goes. I would love to see them all scanned, then but again I'm in the minority. I actually see a value to Murdoch's project."

"You do?" Kevin asked in near shock.

"Imagine the school having a historic focused website, one that links to and is link from Wikipedia and other standard reference sites. A site that lists every boy who ever passed through these halls." Arlene suggested. "Well the Wikipedia bit would just be for the ones who made their marks on history but all the lads would be on our site. For example, any of ours students who went on to win the VC in either of the World Wars, or Korea, or whenever and would be mentioned on Wikipedia because of that. Now think about finding a VC winner on Wikipedia, then being able to click through to our site and seeing that he place third fastest on a sport's day or led his Latin class or any other thing he might have achieved, followed by links to practically every record he appears in. You click on that link and you see a scan of that page with the OCR text beside it. It would give you a more complete view of the boy who grew up to win that medal and how this school shaped him, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, that does sound useful." Kevin said, thinking about past history papers. With a resource like that one, a couple of those papers would have basically written themselves.

"That site could only work once we had several decades worth of records scanned in." Arlene continued. "At the rate we're going, in two or three years we'll hire someone to design the site then turn the senior class' IT types loose on it. Maybe as a class project, maybe something where students can earn extra credit, but I'm sure we can set it up in an affordable way. Now I can see that the computer is almost through its OCR parsing, so I should check to see which book you've selected to do next, just in case."

"Um, sure." Kevin said, handing it to her.

Arlene opened it and smiled.

"Oh dear, you've picked one of the few types of books that we don't plan to scan." Arlene told him. "There is only one of these for each term, and they, along with the medical records, are the only records that we aren't scheduled to post. We really should sort those trolley loads to remove them, but that would take extra time and Murdoch hasn't been able to any librarian hours assigned to the project, so we can't spend the time to do that. We put a load of books then leave it to the students to sort through. You might as well place it on the 'scanned' trolley and pick a new one."

"Really? Why? And what do those columns mean?" Kevin asked.

"Which columns? Maybe I should explain them all." Arlene said.

Arlene stepped over with the book open and Kevin crowded close to her.

"You must recognise the columns labelled student, form, house, date." Arlene said. "They are used to identify the student in question and specify when then entry was made."

"Yes, I knew that, but why are the names in that book to begin with?" "Didn't I already explain that?" Arlene asked.

"I'm sorry, I thought I had. This is a discipline log for recording instances of corporal punishment."

"What?" Kevin asked in surprise.

"You see back in the bad old days they had corporal punishment in schools." Arlene explained. "The 'tar' column says where it was applied, or the target, with H standing for Hand and R standing for rear. Now the 'instr' column lists the instrument. H stood for hand, S for strap, C for cane, B for birch, and Plim for plimsoll."

"What?" Kevin repeated in near shock.

"A plimsoll was a style of gym shoe, which was often used on a boy's backside back in those long ago days." Arlene explained kindly. "You'll notice that the 'cov' column is almost always left blank, to the point that I wonder why they included it. 'Cit' and 'delv' stand for the instructor who cited the boy's behaviour and the one who delivered the punishment. As for reason, sometimes there is shorthand used there, but most times they spelled them out."

"Um, the 'cov' column, what did it..." Kevin began to asked, fumbling for words.

"Oh, that stood for covering." Arlene confirmed.

"Most of the punishments were delivered over trousers, but occasionally they put a u there for underwear or b for bare. There are some t for trouser entries, but very few of those. Other times it's not mentioned, but the birch was most effective on bared behinds, so each time you see a birching it was almost certainly the birch being applied to bare skin. I dare say that there were other punishments delivered with trousers down and the 'cov' column was left blank to spare the lad further embarrassment. Other than the neglect in that column, this is a very complete log for that time period."

"Um, you mean this is a record of every punishment given that term?" Kevin asked, not quite sure if he should believe her, but wondering how this could be a prank. There was no way they could tell that he would have picked this book, was there?

"Oh, of course not." Arlene laughed.

Kevin relaxed and waited to be let in on the joke.

"These are only the official ones." Arlene explained. "Back in those olden times, the some of senior boys used to be able to cane the junior lads. They were limited to six strokes of the cane, and if they abused their power their names would be entered into this book as they were seen to themselves, but none of those punishments were ever recorded. In a way their power practically guaranteed that every lad was thrashed at least once."

"It did? How?" Kevin asked, his eyes running down the page of the discipline book. He was now a believer, knowing that each completed line in that log had recorded a punishment.

"The boys would know who had been caned and who hadn't been, because that's the type of one-upmanship fact that boys would track, and if one had reached the upper forms without getting it then one of the more senior boys was sure to take him down a peg or two." Arlene explained.

"So all the punishments except those are noted?" Kevin asked.

"Well no. There were also the housemothers, who were known to use slippers, hairbrushes, and other maternal tools to keep order, and none of them ever recorded those punishments. Mostly because they were thought minor ones; anything major and the housemother would send the boy off for a good seeing to."

Kevin thought back, remembering times when he had seen housemothers at their wit's end. Of course none of them had ever even threatened to smack any of the lads, but he could easily imagine things going differently back in the first half of the last century.

"And it wasn't only the instructors and housemothers assigning those seeing to's." Arlene continued, indicating the 'Cit' column. "The groundskeeper, the stable master, the senior domestics – even the librarians could assign it."

Kevin's head swam at that last bit.

"No, you can't scan this book, but if you want to you can read it." Arlene told him. "You could even try to puzzle out how Murdoch would have sentenced you back then."

"What? Um, what makes you think..."

"No one ever volunteers to scan those old books." Arlene reminded him. "That's why Murdoch assigns it as a minor 'I caught you doing something, here's some busy work' punishment duty. They did busy work back then too, but it generally happened before or after the thrashing."

"Um, you mean that if I had gone to school back then, and you had seen me goofing off when I had busy work to do, then you could have..."

"Ah, but I couldn't have." Arlene smiled. "Back then, when this book was written, there is no way I could have work here as a librarian. The fairer sex were generally limited to being maids who were expected to do their duties while ignoring the students. But even still, just a second."

Arlene flipped a page, did a quick scan, flipped another page, glanced down, and repeated that until she was eight pages in.

"Here's one." Arlene said. "Here's an entry of a boy getting a rather harsh punishment for 'bothering a maid'."

Arlene didn't decode the meaning of that phrase for Kevin. Today those words implied that a lad had interrupted or gotten in the way of a maid doing her duties, but 'bothering' was that era's code word for sexual assault. Even if the girl was willing, getting caught feeling up a maid meant severe punishment for the boy and possible dismissal for the maid.

"But that was back then, in the dark days before we knew better." Arlene told the student who was crowded close in order to read the book. "Today we have students do detentions, write lines, and get assigned to busy work. Speaking of that last bit, the computer is done processing those last scans. We need to get you another book to scan."

Passing the discipline log to Kevin, Arlene moved to the trolley and bent to pick a book from its lower shelf. Opening it, she straightened and smiled.

"This one has all the Latin marks for the fall term of 1924." Arlene told him. "The results of each quiz, each test, every assignment, it's all here. Which is boring on its own, but interesting to anyone researching one of the lads who went on to be famous. You can put the discipline log on the scanned trolley when you're done paging through it, but you really need to get back to scanning."

"Um, yeah, right." Kevin said, putting the log aside to accept the new book.

Arlene paused as she handed it to him.

"Actually, now that I think about it, the school got its first female librarian in the 1960s." Arlene revealed. "They still made liberal use of the cane back then, so it could have been possible for a female librarian to take you to task over lax performance. I would have to do research to see if she could have handled things herself or sent the student to the head for a thrashing, which would have been your second of that day, and I'm not even sure where I would begin that research, but that does change the answer to your question. In any case, it is passed time for you to return to scanning. Those imagines are date and time stamped, and any long gap would be noticeable."

"Um, yeah, well..."

The librarian left as Kevin was still fumbling for words. He had wanted to ask what she meant about it being 'his' second thrashing of the day. She had used the second person pronoun, not a third person one to refer to a random student back then. If he had been caught then been lax in his busy work, old Murdoch would have thrashed him before sending Kevin to the library then a librarian like Arlene would have sent him for a second thrashing. Two on the same day, one just for lingering...

Like he was lingering now.

Kevin raced to the scanner, scanned in the first page of the new book, saved the image, cued a copy of the image to be converted to a text file, scanned another page, saved the image, cued a copy to be converted, and was once more ahead of the OCR program. He did a few more pages, then opened the discipline log. Working a bit slower, Kevin stay four or five scans ahead as he looked through the log.

Time and again he saw things in the reason column that had earned him a sharp word or a dirty look, but had earned each of these boys a more painful fate. Sometimes it was delivered to their hands and sometimes to their bottoms, but they had all paid a price that Kevin had never considered having to pay such a minor thing. Other things had landed him in detention, but in the fall of 1924 the sentence for those misdeeds would have included a sore bottom. Tallying his misdeeds against that log, Kevin had to wonder if he would have ever been able to sit comfortably if had he lived back then.

Then another thought stuck him: maybe he would have been able to sit comfortably, but only because he would have been deterred from committing all of those misdeeds. It was one thing to act up when you knew you only faced a sharp word, but would he have done it knowing that his bottom would pay that price? Kevin didn't think so.

The discipline log supported that line of thinking. Seeing why boys were punished back then, Kevin knew that on the average day half of the students now enrolled here would get their names in that book, but the log didn't show that. Only a relatively few names were entered on any single day, not the hundreds that would be there if the school's current population was sent back a century in time.

That line of thinking left Kevin wondering what sort of person he would have been if he had lived back then. Perhaps he would be less inclined to question authority, more likely to go with the flow, and maybe he would have been a bit more timid about taking chances. Odds were good that if he had been there in 1914 his name would now grace the school's war memorial. Even if he didn't go on to being one of the honoured dead, his name would have certainly graced the plaque that listed school's chum's brigade, senior boys who had rushed from their classrooms to join the war.

But even if the threat of corporal punishment had kept him generally in line, Kevin couldn't help thinking about those times he would have gotten out of line. He knew that no one could be an angel all the time, so his name would have been entered in that log at least a few times. Kevin shivered, thinking about waiting outside the head's office. He had done that, a few times, but all he had faced was a stern lecture which would tell him which of his privileges would be taken away and for how long he would have to do without it. Waiting there had been unnerving at the time, and seriously scary that one time the head had mentioned suspension, but how had those lads felt? Waiting, knowing that when they were called in they would be thrashed for their misdeeds. Kevin couldn't begin to comprehend how it would have felt to wait like that.

Or to know that the housemother could smack whenever she choose to. Kevin couldn't help recalling several times when normal late night antics would have resulted in red bottoms if they had happened decades ago. Even the librarians in those days could have done more than hush unruly students.

The OCR program almost caught up with the scanned images as Kevin considered that last point. Had the assistant head librarian been joking about how she might send him for a thrashing if they had been living in the 1960s? Or was she just referring an obscure fact when she said that?

Kevin forced himself to return to scanning Latin records as he tried not to picture Ms. Duke standing behind him with a cane in her hand. He told himself that it was merely a flight of fancy, that the librarian couldn't have implied that she would have seen him caned. She was a modern woman, not a relic from the late 1800s or early 1900s. Caning had been banned for years and years, so the woman had never been called to deliver a thrashing. She was a librarian, so it must be that she knew about caning from these records that the school had stored for all of those decades.

Flipping between the discipline log and the Latin book, Kevin slowly lost track of time. It wasn't until he scanned in the last entry of the Latin book that he noticed the hour. Due to the distraction of the discipline journal, he had worked more than half an hour longer than his sentence. He knew that he could never tell anyone that he had actually donated time to Old Murdoch's pet project. He hoped that no one had noticed how the library would be closing in 25 minutes and he was still in this backroom.

Kevin sheepishly put both volumes on the scanned trolley. When he turned to leave he saw Arlene standing at the door.

"I thought that Old Murdoch must have sentenced you to extra scanning time." Arlene told him. "Regardless, the library will be closing soon."

"Um, I was so close to the end I decided to scan the last few pages." Kevin answered.

"From the some of that hard drive, the OCR is still churning away." Arlene noted. "You'll have to stay until it's done so you can shut the system down."

"Yeah, I guess I will."

Arlene strolled to the "to be scanned" trolley. She checked four books with green binding before finding what she was looking for.

"Now this one is an interesting case." Arlene declared as she flipped through the book.

"There are blanket policies for the discipline logs and medical records, but this is one of several volumes that's iffy. One of the art instructors in the 1920s added countless sketches to his record books, which makes things complicated. We'd like to scan in the art grades and we really want to record which student placed where during the student art shows, but, well, you can see the difficulty."

Arlene handed the book to Kevin and he saw the problem. There, on the unused lower third of a page, was sketch of a schoolboy grasping his ankles as a cane crashed down on his bottom. Arlene reached over and flipped the page, showing that the next page had a sketch of a different schoolboy, this one was sporting cane lines on his bare bottom.

"We might need to edit the scanned images, editing those drawings out." Arlene commented causally, taking the book back as she spoke.

Arlene put the book back on the trolley.

"Well it looks as if the computer is done processing, so you can turn it off now." Arlene told him. "Then I'll lock up the room until Old Murdoch corners another minor miscreant."

Kevin swallowed hard and nodded. He shut down the computer while Arlene waited by the door, then they returned to the main part of the library.

"I'll let Murdoch know you did your time." Arlene told him. "And remember, all of those books need to scanned in, so if you ever feel like volunteering for real you can."

"Um, yeah, I might." Kevin said, almost surprising himself.

"That's wonderful, and anytime is good, except that tomorrow is a bit of a problem." Arlene told him. "I'm booked solid for most of the day. If you wanted to come by tomorrow then the best I could do would be let you into that room at around nine then lock you in until four in the afternoon. But on the plus side, I'd give you a note so you could get a packed lunch and some snacks from the kitchens. Plus there's a water closet in back there; it hasn't been remodelled in decades, but it still works."

"Locked in?" Kevin asked in disbelief.

"We can't leave those records open for browsing." Arlene said seriously. "They might be decades old but they are still covered by privacy laws. Anyone doing scanning counts as an archivist, but we can't have students wandering through those stacks and reading them at random. If you come in tomorrow then you'd be totally alone in that part of the library until four in the afternoon."

Kevin considered that for a moment. Locked in that old section of the library, completely alone, he could work like crazy to build up a backlog for the OCR then study that art ledger (and perhaps another discipline log) to his heart's content.

"Um, yeah, well, I think I could do that." Kevin said, nodding slowly. "If you gave me that note for the kitchen."

Arlene smiled and wrote the note. Watching him go, she knew she had moved the project ahead by about a week. That old art instructor might have been a bit of a perv but his ledgers kept the project steaming ahead. All she had to do was flash one at a member of the senior class, promise that they would have several hours alone with that art, and the lad jumped at the chance to scanned books for hour after hour. It generally only worked once before they discovered that they could find better drawings (as well as countless photos) on the web, but while it worked it built the archival database that much faster.

Arlene found herself wondering if Kevin pictured himself as a prefect swinging the cane or as one of the boys bending for a thrashing, but she knew it didn't matter, not as long as the scanning was done. For her part, Arlene knew that if she had worked at the school in the bad old days than she would have no issue with telling a boy like Kevin to drop trou for six (or even a dozen) of the best and paint those lines on his bottom herself. She was sure that it would be satisfying to wipe a smirk off a boy's face and replaced it with the respect a good thrashing brought.

But those bad old days were long in the past, and Arlene wished good riddance to them. Today's schoolboys might sometimes dream of canes and sore bottoms, but they wouldn't glimpse the reality behind those dreams, not this side of an adult club or a lover's game. Not until they could decide to try something like that on their own, a path that left far fewer emotional scar than introducing the cane to them as students.


Goodgulf

[Michael_A]

Excellent detailed story up to now , i'm eager to see how this will pan out and i'm imagining Arlene finding a reason to discipline kevin .

[pa1ra]

Very nice development. Good (surprising) twist at the end
Like to read your stories. Best wishes for 2016

[goodgulf]

Thanks for taking the time to reply - and I shall endeavor to have a wonderful year.

I should be posting more soon.

Goodgulf