The CARL Archives and Government Documents departments are
busily preparing documents to send off to a vendor to be scanned. To process each document takes multiple steps
and countless hours of many staff members’ time. Each document is evaluated for its
condition. Some documents are too large
to scan or just too far “gone” to be scanned.
Then research is done to see if the item may have already been scanned
and online at another institution. Each document is then treated for any condition
issues. Staples are removed, tears are
mended, and they are put into a new housing if needed. The attached picture is
of one such document that had to be taken apart to be scanned property. This particular document was NAILED together
as well as glued. For bidding purposes
each document needs counting as well.
Pages are tabulated based on size, color, and whether or not the pages
are loose or bound. Finally all these
documents are put into a spreadsheet for tracking and bidding purposes.
All that explanation to say that when we’re going through
each document page by page you come across some really cool stuff. One such document took hours to process. There were staples upon staples to remove and
the paper was so fragile that merely bending it would cause it to break. It was a collection of daily summaries
concerning Operation Anvil/ Operation Dragoon.
Of course it is unclassified at this point in time, but you could still
read at the top, underneath the read wax crayon somebody used to cross it out,
the word “BIGOT.” “BIGOT” was a classification marking used
during World War II. I have read a
couple different explanations of where the term came from, but the most common
is that it is a shortened phrase “British Invasion of German Occupied
Territory”. The origins of the term is
unimportant in my opinion. What is cool,
is that documents marked “BIGOT” were classified above everything else. In order for a person to see a document so
marked, they had to have a need to know and be on a specific list. The list of personnel cleared to see the
plans was known as the BIGOT list. These
documents that were once so secret it didn’t matter what security clearance you
had, if you weren’t on the list, you did not see them, are going to be visible
to the public. So eventually this document that was once only seen by the likes
of Eisenhower and a few select others can be viewed by millions.
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