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Project Narrative - Staff
For most of its course the project has run on one
full-time position, divided among 3 part-time staff members,
either people with MA degrees or advanced students. We benefited
greatly from the stability of this group. From the beginning
Barbara Frey Näf was Project Manager with a 50% appointment.
The two other members of the team with whom the work was begun
remained with the project till well beyond the half-way mark,
and their successors saw the work through to its end. We benefited
additionally by being able to use working-time of two people
financed from outside the project. For two years the Basel
Mission (German Branch) was able to secure the assistance
of a German anthropologist who was responsible for co-ordinating
the project with the archival holdings of this organisation
in Stuttgart, and who also supported us in Basel in the early
stages of cataloguing. Towards the end of our work a Swiss
student spent part of his alternative service time as a conscientious
objector in the project, partly cataloguing, and partly editing
the growing database (Table 3d). A number of other students
carried out the practical training required by their courses
in anthropology or librarianship in the project.
The project
depended absolutely on the motivation, skills and accuracy
of the people doing the detailed work with the photographs.
They became paragons of science, working in a language which
was not their own (English), evaluating visual sources for
the history of non-western cultures, manipulating modern computer
software and evaluating original documentation written in
the old German (Sütterlin, or "Gothic") handwriting. Above
all they maintained their curiosity about the details of the
next image to be catalogued over years of work.
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