Thanks for the kind words. As of this week both Internet Archives and Google Books are still short-staffed with backlogs. I'd hoped to just hand each of them a copy to cut up and scan, but it looks now as if it'll get done faster if I digitize it myself, which they are both encouraging me to do. Otherwise I'll be sending them copies that will probably sit in their respective to-do piles. The other advantage that has only recently come to mind concerns the use of James Hodam's original color artwork. He learned to mix his own pigments from his father, Adam Hodam, and that allowed him to make color maps of the various battles, etc. that he wanted to portray. They show up a lot better in color than in black and white. As the Journal was a self-published effort, only family members got color copies due to the higher cost. I also have the professional grade copies of just the color pages we sent to the original printer that I could scan, but they're too big for my home scanner. I need a work-around for this, and I also need to learn from the tutorials both services sent whether or not I can upload pages of the same book using both both jpeg format and tiff, or anything that would let me provide a better image than the jpeg level does.

If I have to scan every page in the higher format just to make the pages with images come out better, its going to slow me down just that much more. I'd like to avoid that if possible. I've tested my printer/scanner on the text pages and it works fine, everything's very legible. But its not the best format for the pages that have black and white photos, and I'm assuming that will also be true of the color maps.

I'm no kind of tech head at all, and haven't yet started reading the tutorial links both services sent, so if anyone has a quick answer to whether I can upload a combination of jpeg and higher quality files within the same project, please feel free to contact me. My intent at this time is to start scanning the first week in June. No one in the family wants to print another run of these journals and be responsible for marketing them, but James Hodam was an articulate Virginian who saw a lot of the Civil War, and was very lucky to have survived as many events as he did. His Journal turned out really well. I'm not going to let all his work and that of my late stepfather fade from view, and the existence of the Internet means nothing like this has to ever again. And there are so many more names of people in the Journal as a whole - he incorporated some material on what it was like to grow up in Roane Co, who the neighbors were, etc. Its definitely more than just a Civil War diary.

So again, June is my target for getting this done. Thanks for the interest.

Diane Goodboe