Visit to the National Archives, College Park, MD, July 21

[Deering, Brian R.]

Folks

 

My oldest son and I visited the National Archives in College Park, MD on July 21. What a great place to visit. The people there were wonderful, polite, helpful and interested. It's almost like it wasn't a real federal agency. It took us about 1/2 an hour to clear security, get our 'research card,' register our equipment and determine where we were supposed to be. The facility itself is great, the reading room has plenty of space, plenty of electrical outlets and lots of light and lighting. The records I requested by fax on Thursday had been pulled and were ready for us when we arrived.

 

The INTSUMS from January 1, 1968 thru May 31, 1968 were in a separate box, ordered by date and grouped by half month periods. Some dates were missing, some groups of dates were missing making wonder if it was an error in recordkeeping back in 1968, a random sort of error, or a conspiracy.

 

It took us a while to get our equipment setup and tested, determine how the records were organized, and to figure out who was doing what. We had been there for about 2 hours before our camera battery went dead and we were able to copy 8 days worth of documents. The camera technique for the most part created INTSUMS that are readable by humans but I don't think we can OCR them. On our next visit we will probably have a flatbed scanner that we can use also. Since we will not have as much prep and testing next time and both of us are able to work simultaneously on different folders we should be able increase our throughput considerably.

 

The INTSUMS are double sided documents and the text on the back of the page bleeds through making it more difficult to digitally process them. We are lucky though in that sometime between 1-18-1968 and 2-13- 1968 the documents changed from mimeographs (almost impossible to digitally capture) to what appear to be Photostats (comparatively much better than mimeograph).

 

I've attached a few images from February so you can check them out. I have uploaded all of the images we captured on 7/21 to our Google Groups file section available at http://groups.google.com/group/tet_project/files?&sort=name.

 

Captain Freddie

 

I think I will be able to capture all of the available INTSUMS for the period we've decided upon.

 

The archive folks also pulled other 1st Cav records for me that were not INTSUMS such as Daily Journals, After Action Reports, Lessons Learned, and Command Reports. I didn't capture any of those but they are available. I did not get any 'morning reports" but there were INTSUM Addendums such as this one http://tet_project.googlegroups.com/web/INTSUM.1968-02-19.P0010.JPG?gda=EWf2xkwAAABkV1NmEhZCcDYkjxPAO7rzAhwV-CN5ZmxxR8V0R8um6mG1qiJ7UbTIup-M2XPURDTrhRhtRgjwZ_Nm_Tv3NzFl3NRdCtZjYMLu8U0VCsJqxA.

 

Just Brian &

Justin

 

 

[Bergerson Fred]

Dear Deerings,

What an experience.  You did a great job. I am just starting to examine the intsums. At one point I got the chills. Thanks for your efforts and insights.

 

Best,

Fred