As you may know, in addition to my internship, the other big thing going on this semester is my Directed Study with Dr. Lemley.  The project is on tracing the development of community in the South Side over the past 100 years, and it’s been difficult so far, but interesting.  One of the first tasks I had to do was get census information on the neighborhood going back to 1920. Easy, right?  Not so much.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The census data for modern decades is easily attainable online.  Further back than that, however, and it gets real dicey.  The choices are to either scan through a million and a half scanned records that are unsearchable, or go to Hillman’s microfilm collection.

Now that’s an adventure…

microfilm.jpgThe machines must be 50+ years old, and they look like something out of a really bad late 20th century sci-fi movie.  They’re located in the back room at Hillman, and when I went back there, the employee was immensely surprised to see me.  Oddly enough, people don’t use the machines very often…

We had to look through shelves upon shelves of little boxes to find the right one, and then I had to scan through the film until I found the right information.  It felt like I was in a movie doing research in some weird alternate universe…I can’t believe that at one time people used them a lot.  It’s kind of like when my mom told me about how they used to use some kind of number system to find books in the library, and there were cabinets upon cabinets of little cards that would tell you where the book was.  Weird.

We still have a long way to go before we get enough information to build a good case, but I’ll keep you posted!