Sample of Lodge Minutes from April 1971
The work of preserving the Lodge's minutes in digital format has reached its second milestone. The first milestone was reached in 2004, when all minutes preserved in the Temple office were scanned, processed with optical character recognition (OCR) software, and then converted into HTML format for display on the Internet. This first section of the work covered minutes from approximately 1990 to the present day.
The only copies of pre-1990 minutes still available are the carbon copies sent to the Grand Secretary and deposited in the archives of the Grand Lodge of Japan. For several years now, MWB Watanabe, Secretary of Far East Lodge No. 1, has been painstakingly scanning fifty years of Grand Lodge archives, including the minutes of all daughter lodges. Last year he kindly presented Far East Lodge No. 1 with a CD disk containing lodge minutes from 1971 to 2004.
Sample of Lodge Minutes from April 1971
The work of converting minutes dating back to 1971 has taken far longer than the conversion of more recent documents. Earlier minutes were typed on paper that has yellowed and darkened over time, and much of the content is now barely legible. An added complication is that several of our Lodge Secretaries employed the services of Japanese typists whose poor command of English resulted in numerous mistakes, especially in the spelling of Lodge members' names.
Depending on the quality of the original minutes, the accuracy of OCR processing has varied from over 90% to less than 30%. In the latter case, it has proved quicker to re-type the minutes from scratch. In converting the resulting text files to Web format, efforts have been made to correct typing mistakes and omissions, and all names have been checked, where possible, against those listed in membership records.
Sample of Lodge Minutes from June 1977
Now that the second milestone has been reached, the next goal will be the completion of all remaining minutes, from 1949 to 1970. This final part of the work promises to be the most difficult of all and will probably take several years. However, once the minutes are in digital form, they can be readily copied and preserved, and can be easily accessed through the Internet.
This ongoing project is far from perfect or complete and Brethren browsing through the minutes currently available can help greatly by reporting any mistakes they find.