The Monster Book of Monsters

You thought the book in Harry Potter was bad? Well, I found the Muggle equivalent. You can see the book here.

I walked into work sometime last week when Elder Pretzel stopped me and told me he had a project for me. He then handed me a book. It was a relatively small book, bound in black, with "Supplement 8" stamped in gold on front. It didn't look like it could possibly be all that scary, so without a second thought, I took it from him and asked what the project was. This was a bad idea. I should have called in sick that day; I should have walked past him and pretend I didn't hear his plea. Sometimes, I am simply too nice. It didn't take me long to figure out that there was a serious problem with the binding of the book when he started to show me the page numbers that counted down instead of up. I took the book back to my cubicle and sat down to do some serious investigation.

I ended up making a copy of the title page and putting post it notes all over the book to indicate where new chapters started and whether the pages were going left to right or right to left. According to the title page, there are two chapters numbered IV. Luckily, none of the actual chapters in the book were numbered, so I just ignored the numbers in the Title Page and used 1, 2, 3, etc. Also, please note on the Title Page that IV is Genetic Information, then three chapters later (VI... which 6 is not three chapters after 4) is Titles, explanation. Now, look at the actual page it is found on. The two chapters are on the same page in the opposite order. Then, when I got to the Hereditary Societies, I had no idea if they were going from left to right or right to left. I could see no logic behind the sorting of them. Finally I had to take it into Polar Aunt who is much more of a genealogist than I am, and she showed me how they really were in alphabetical order.

Finally, three days later, when I finally had it figured out, I took it back to Elder Pretzel so that he could rescan the book in the correct order. He finished and I grabbed the folder of tif files and replaced the folder with the old scans I had from before when they scanned it out of order. Then I started to build a digital table of contents. Well, true to craziness form, only one section of the book had page numbers, so trying to paginate (the process of making a spreadsheet with a row for every page, listing the page number, any page heading, and the chapter it belongs to) was nigh unto impossible. Finally I made the executive decision to break the rules and skip pagination and do it on the fly while Kofaxing (the process of cropping and adding metadata to a book).

Next step, import files into Kofax. This I did, then started cropping. Halfway through cropping I realized that for one section of the book, every other page was a repeat of another section of the book. It's like a handful of pages were duplicated and inserted into every other page. Lots of troubleshooting later, it turns out that when I replaced the old book with the new book, it decided to be ridiculous and kept some of the pages of the old book and put them in the new book. I have no idea how this happened since I replaced a folder with a folder, not files with files... but somehow, that's what happened.

Today I came into work, determined to finish this book. So I sat at my computer, clicking digitally through the book one page at a time, while turning the pages in the physical book one at a time with my other hand, deleting the pages that were wrong. Three times through the book later, I finally felt confident that all the pages were correct.

Next came Validation. This is the module where you enter the page numbers, page headings, and chapter headings. You typically do this with the digital table of contents created earlier, but since I skipped it, I was making it up as I went. It wasn't too bad, actually, except for one small thing. The Chapter Heading field is a sticky field, meaning, you only have to type "Chapter One" in one page, then it will stay there for every subsequent page, until you change it. Then it will change for every subsequent page, etc., etc. Now, once it is in a page, it will stay there until you manually change it. So, if I entered in "Chapter One" for 20 pages, then realized it changed to "Chapter Two" for the last 10 pages, I would have to go back and manually change that field for every incorrect page. Hey, guess what I did? [rolls eyes] I thought I had them all fixed, though.

After finally finishing this nightmare of a book, I released it and begged The Heartless Siren to load it, even though she was done loading books for that collection for the day, simply so I could blog about it and link to it. She did. Bless her. I started blogging about it and opened the link to the book only to find that in one page I had typed "Sanders To Caesar" and the rest of the pages in that chapter got "Sanders to Caesar".

Another thing about chapter headings. What CONTENTdm (the hosting site) will do is look at the chapter heading in the metadata and create a folder by that name. When it gets to the next page, if the chapter heading is exactly the same, it will put that page in the same folder. If the chapter heading changes in the slightest, it will create a new folder by that name. So I had two chapters. "Sanders To Caesar" had one page and "Sanders to Caesar" had eight pages. So I fixed it. (Good thing I was blogging about it, eh?) And just now, as I went to count how many pages the second section had, I realized that I had combined the chapters incorrectly and it went page 61, 60, 62. That's right, I can't count. So I just fixed that. And now it's indexing. And, of course, I just realized that Heartless and I learned today that you don't have to index after changing the structure of a page. Brilliant. 15 minutes of waiting for an index for no reason.

The book is now complete, happy and fixed. If you find any problems with this book, please never tell me. I might throw it at you.