Preserving Historical Masonic Records

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Lots and Lots of Records

~14,000,000 Index Cards

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Lots of Data

Roster Books Minutes Books Annual Returns Officer Registries Much, much more

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Manual Data is Bad

Bad Date Formats Misspelled Names Extinct Lodges Missing Information

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Index Cards

Most jurisdictions have a card file. Cards typically contain a smaller subset

of modern datasets. Card files are deteriorating in many

ways: Paper breakdown

Are your cards on archive quality paper?

Misfiling Ink fading

Are you inks archive quality?

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Index Card Risks and Costs

Property housing cards is expensive: Environmental controls. Humidity and temperature need to be

maintained at appropriate levels. Access to information is difficult.

Access requires staff time. Cards can be hard to find. Cards are hard to read. Handling them can damage them.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Scanning Cards

Requires professional grade scanners. Requires professional grade software. It is time consuming. Cards commonly use many formats.

But… we need to do it.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Why Scan Cards

Preservation One fire, one flood and they are gone.

You can’t get them back. Morally it’s the right thing to do.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Scanning Process

Cards are scanned to an image. Image files need to be maintained. Scanning projects can produce a large

volume of data. Hundreds of thousands of image files.

Data needs to be extracted from image files.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Scanning is a First Step

Data needs to be extracted. Formats of data need to be

standardized. OCR is not adequate for all cases. Crowd sourcing data is an option.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Integrating Data into Operations

Historical Data is frequently of lesser quality than modern data.

Integrating with operational system is difficult. Missing data is the largest issue to get

over.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Grand Lodge of Massachusetts

Scanned card file in 2009 Worked with the New England

Genealogical Society. Extracting some data via Optical

Character Recognition. Looking at integrating data into

operational database.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Grand Lodge of North Carolina

Acquiring scanner Using professional grade software. Using staff resources to do it.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Masonicapedia

The Goal Central repository for deceased member

data. Available on the Internet. Available to researchers in academia. By Masons for Masons. Grand Lodges can participate at the level

they are comfortable with.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

Masonicapedia

Initial prototype was created in 2008 based on MORI system.

Lessons Learned: Existing data models are hard to adapt to

historical data. Deceased records data can be more highly

optimized than operational data. To scale to the size of current deceased

data for all of Masonry the data storage can be rethought and optimized.

© 2006 Vita Rara, Inc.

About Vita Rara, Inc.

Mark Menard, President Vita Rara, Inc. mark@vitarara.net (518) 369-7356 Visit our table in the vendor area near

the registration desk.