Occasional notes from the work.

Checking the Pérec stick against the laser

The quarterly verification came due on Monday. We take the brass-and-cherry story pole the founding group had made in 1997 — the Pérec stick — and measure each of its ten engraved divisions against the laser distance-meter. The stick runs 3.048 m (exactly ten feet, in the older convention the founders preferred). After twenty-nine years of winter-summer cycling in an unheated survey van it is now 3.047 m, which is to say within the ±5 mm tolerance we claim for principal members and well within what the brass can be trusted to hold.

We keep the stick in rotation for another quarter. The laser will fail before the stick does. This is a fact known in the trade but worth observing in writing.

On the reed-organ book

Mrs. Lapierre of the lower concession had said, when we first spoke in 2022, that her mother's reed-organ book was "somewhere in the house, I will find it before I go." She gave it to us yesterday, unbound and loose-leafed, in a flour sack. One hundred and sixty-three hymns in four different hands, the earliest dated 1888 at the foot of a setting of Bringing in the Sheaves.

We have photographed every leaf in the reading room this morning and returned the sack to Mrs. Lapierre's daughter this afternoon. The photographs will accession as NHI-A-071 once Theodore has drafted the finding aid. The book itself is at home where it belongs.

Lot 7, Concession III, under a tarp

Photogrammetry of the 1831 barn completed this week, fourteen months after we first proposed the rig. The south roof slope has failed further since summer; we tarped it on Wednesday with the owner's permission, using the lighter rated ballast on the standing timbers so as not to overload the compromised purlin. Laser scan captured 2.1 billion points. Drafting begins next month.

The east gable still holds, and the apprentice-marks on the northern principal post are still legible. Whatever comes of the stabilisation conversation, we now hold the building digitally to within three millimetres.

A correction to the subject vocabulary

The controlled vocabulary we use for indexing the oral history series has, until this month, listed sugar bush and sugar wood as synonyms. Three sessions recorded this spring make clear they are not: the bush is the tapped stand, the wood is the firewood reserve set aside for boiling. A sugar bush without a sugar wood is a social failure, says Mr. Morin, because it means you are buying heat, and the whole economy of the operation is organised around not doing that.

We have split the terms in the vocabulary as of Friday. Retrospective re-indexing of 218 affected sessions is scheduled for autumn, which is to say, when the drafts begin to catch up with the ambitions.

The quarterly acquisitions committee, briefly

Thirteen items considered; five accepted, four declined with a referral to the originating member society, four deferred for further consultation with the depositor. Among the accepted: a run of thirty-one co-operative dairy ledgers (now accessioned as NHI-A-063) whose significance the committee spent perhaps forty minutes discussing before the question of shelf-space occupied another twenty.

We will need a fourth bay of compact shelving by 2027. The partner university has been advised.

Twenty-seven years since ratification

The charter was ratified on this day in 1998 at the annual meeting of the Beaver Meadow Historical Society. A quiet anniversary observed, as always, by the reading-aloud of the Hollister Rider on pace and the striking of a single bell in the meeting-house at Beaver Meadow. The rider reads, in full: "No engagement shall be accepted that cannot be completed without compromise to the community of origin, the durability of the deposit, or the thoroughness of the draftsman." It remains a working instruction.