They gave me a lanyard, a locker, and the rules that matter: no ink, no scarves, no jewellery that can snag, no assumptions. Pencils only. Hands clean. If you find metal in paper, you don't be a hero — you call Conservation.
The project manager walked me through the run: intake → condition check → capture → metadata → QC → return. Tables in a long room, bright and even, cameras at their stations, grey cards and cradles set the way they should be.
First win came on something small, which is how it should be. A barcode didn't match the box list — numbers transposed in a scrawl. The operator was about to scan a folder labelled 1890 into a series that began 1909. It would have sailed through capture and created a ghost in the catalogue that would haunt someone else six months from now. I asked for the list, read it out loud back to front, and caught the twin digits where the handwriting drifted.
By mid-morning I'd seen enough to know where to stand. I moved to metadata prep, not at a screen but at the table. I wrote a one-page crib for dates and names and taped it to the edge of the desk: month forms the operators would meet in the wild, punctuation that trips search, how to record a dash so it sorts as a range and not as subtraction. The young operator opposite me tried it on the next stack and smiled without looking up. That's what you want — one less friction in a room built of frictions.
On the whiteboard, someone updated the schedule: MISC. (pre-1914) — pending allocation.
I didn't react. I finished my batch, moved my chair to let a trolley pass, and wrote a note to myself on the corner of the QC sheet: If “pre-1914” lands in intake, volunteer to shadow. Not a plan. An available pair of hands.