If I have offended anyone in my attempts (as a member of the Monson Historical Society (MHS)) to raise questions concerning MHS's modis operandi, and its priorities and to share my concerns with the other members, I apologize. However, I make no apologies for the principles promulgated, nor my taking the matter beyond the membership to the elected officers of the town - a step taken, mainly because of the lack of cooperation in disseminating those principles amoung the membership at large in preparation for this evenings meeting.

My main concern is the availability/accessibility of the information in the Town of Monson's historical documents, particularly from the 1800s. MHS is said to have a comprehensive collection of such documents. The progress made by some multi-instutional efforts such as  Making of America, in making digitized versions of like documents available over the internet has been truly remarkable, particularly in the last 10 years. I have suggested that this be a priority of MHS, at least of the catagory mentioned above.

What might this entail for the MHS? 1) It requires a scanning of each page of said douments, an effort that can be done concurrently with the ongoing accessioning efforts; and 2) sharing those scanned images with an institution willing to host them on their website.

Of course there a host of other considerations, such as:

1. ensuring that the scanned images are good enough for further OCR processing. This involves alignment and resolution issues.
2. accessibility to the documents for scanning. This involves, a) assuming to the scanning has to be done at MHS, more office hours with the required supervision; or b) assuming it can be outsourced without supervision, a more effective use of everybodies time.