This (complete, I believe at this time) run of scans of 48 issues of The Organizer, the paper of the 1934 Minneapolis truckers strike, was made from a microfilm record, because I was unable to get scanning-access to original paper of this periodical.

The microfilm was made by the Wisconsin Historical Society.  

The scans were made for me by John A Friend of the Wisconsin Historical Society, using their state of the art, top of the line commercial Mekel Mark V microfilm scanner.  

I have been told by the WHS that, as long as the original paper is in the public domain (it is) and my distribution is not being done for profit, the Wisconsin Historical Society has no problem with the scans being freely distributed.  

These scans were delivered to me on a hard drive as individual .tiff files, the output of the fast and highly automated Mekel Mark V.  I spent hours carefully cropping and assembling these pages into intact multi-page (one file per issue) .pdf files.



A problem with these images:

There is one problem with this archive, which unfortunately was (in the absence of a time machine) beyond my power to fix: The images of the first eight issues of The Organizer are somewhat damaged.  They have lost a number of letters from each word in every line from the left side of the left (page 1 and 3) or the right side of the right (pages 2 and 4) columns.  

This is because those issues were filmed from a bound volume of the paper, and those involved in ordering and/or making the microfilm refused to unbind the volume and lay each page flat when it was filmed.  

The bad news is that this is a serious failing in many microfilm records.  The worse news is that often after such inadequate filming is done, the institution involved decided "Oh... we've now made a lasting state of the art archival record, so we will now throw the original paper in the dumpster."  

The good news is in this case, this serious problem affects ONLY  the first 8 of these 48 issues.  Starting with v1n9 (the first of the two v1n9's) those creating the original microfilm either began to unbind the volume, or had the issues as separate sheets.

The even better news is that, apart from the problem with lost parts of columns in the first 8 issues, this microfilm is of relatively high quality, relatively well-made (as microfilm goes), AND that the scans made by John and his Mekel Mark V are superlatively well done.

True, scans from from even the very best-made microfilm are pretty much always significantly inferior to those from original paper.  Photos get over-contrasted. Art is degraded somewhat.  Text is slightly less sharp.  However, THIS record suffers far less from these problems than most scans from microfilm.  

It also is the case that much existing microfilm, especially that made prior to the mid 1960's, is of execrably poor quality, truly incompetently made, suffering from seriously bad lighting, paper not being flat, improper exposure to the point of whiting out large parts of the page, sometimes, and/or out of focus images.  We are fortunate that this microfilm, made by the Wisconsin Historical Society, is among the highest quality and best made of all microfilm records, for the most part.

---marty

Martin H. Goodman MD
Director, Riazanov Library digital archive project

San Pablo, CA Dec 23 2013