The Ashes of Waco

Snipers

Today's picture of the Mt. Carmel building was taken from inside one of the three sniper outposts set up by the FBI during the siege. The flag is mounted on one of the tanks patrolling the grounds.

Guns 'n' Guitars 'n' Cars

After the siege began, government agents began a psychological campaign aimed at convincing those inside the Mt. Carmel building to surrender. They also cleared a large area around the edifice, and this meant the destruction (by tanks and gunfire) or disappearance of several of the vehicles owned by the residents. This is one important area of controversy.

This photo shows an agent posing on a captured Branch Davidian motorcycle. Note the painting on the bike's gas tank, which depicts a six-winged guitar-playing long-tailed seraph and the words 'Rock 'n' Roll'. (I believe that the Branch Davidian flag is illustrated with a six-winged dragon or serpent.)

A Selection of New Scans

Here we present a few newly-scanned items of interest.

Firstly, three fake postage stamps, creators unknown (if anyone out there knows who made these, please sing out!). It's likely that the stamps were produced by an underground anti-government constitutionalist group who actually used them to send mail. It is impossible to say how many letters posted with stamps such as these made it through the postal system. 

Next we have a promotional postcard for the controversial documentary "Waco: The Big Lie":

Stay tuned for more scans through next week. We will be closed for the end-of-year break for two weeks following. We welcome your questions and comments. Please know that we are interested in presenting all facets we can surrounding this story but that we refrain from drawing any conclusions publicly or producing editorial statements, no matter what our private opinions or understandings may be. 'Til next time!

Floor Plans

The collection holds many different floor plans of the Mt. Carmel center, ranging from blueprints to post-fire maps showing locations where evidence and the remains of the deceased were found (these were originally marked 'Confidential'). The plans shown here list the occupants and uses of each room in the complex.

Greetings!

I’m Kurt Johnson. I’ve been working with Joel on the Ashes of Waco material since the beginning of October. I’m extremely excited to be involved in this project. I’m a recent graduate of the School of Information at the University of Texas, and I’ve been interested for years in many topics related to this undertaking, from information organization to digital preservation, from the variety and history of religious belief to civil rights and questions of government power (and abuse thereof).

My first task here was to go through the archive, box by box, and enter folder details into a searchable database. This process allowed me to familiarize myself with the collection’s contents. It was also something of a journey of discovery: I had some previous knowledge of the events that occurred outside of Waco in 1993, and was aware of various controversies surrounding those events, but I was unprepared for the ocean of history, facts and myriad interpretations of those facts, evidence, legal and governmental documents, transcripts, first-hand accounts and private correspondence, official and underground rhetoric, newspaper reports, theories, conjectures, and more that awaited me.  It got pretty overwhelming at times, but the material is important and fascinating, tragic and at times outrageous, and gradually certain ideas began to take shape for me.

Recently, I began scanning representative documents and digitizing select videotapes in preparation for uploading to the internet. Our server space will not permit us to post everything we’d like to add, but we hope to be able to host a broad range of representative items. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, or requests, please feel free to contact us.

Over the course of this endeavor, we will be posting sample material to the blog. Here is a photo from a large batch I recently digitized: 

The above photo was taken shortly after 12:10 pm on 4/19/93. The archive contains over 130 aerial photos from that day, starting before 11:15 am. These photos illustrate the gradual dismantling of Mt. Carmel over the course of the morning.  

Digitization has begun

Kurt and I have finished the descriptive database containing all the AOW materials in the collection. This included rating every folder, tape, etc. so we could prioritize the digitization work. I mentioned this system in an earlier post. For the audio and video records we had to get a little more creative with prioritizing so we created slightly different systems for those. Yesterday we ran reports based on types of record (e.g., correspondence, subject file, negotiation recording, siege footage) and on priority assigned, and then we sat down and analyzed what we have and what we want to focus on first.

I should back up a bit to earlier in the week, when Kurt started digitizing some negotiation transcripts. We discovered that these files were going to be much bigger than anticipated because we're creating PDFs, which is the only feasible option for these records. When we run the PDFs through OCR, the sizes get quite larger. We soon figured out that we'd be taking up our whole allotted storage space at OCLC with transcripts alone! While they are the backbone of the materials and thus the exhibit, there are way too many other important documents to digitize, many of which are audio and video, which of course take up a lot of space themselves.

So I decided we will digitize a cross sampling of the materials, rather than trying to get all the higher priority items up. We will still focus on the priority 1 & 2 items, and we will create a descriptive record in CONTENTdm for every item, regardless of assigned priority. This way a researcher can see at least a description of everything we have, and if not also a digital surrogate of what they are looking for, then one of a similar item. Also, as we get more OCLC (or local) storage space, we could digitize and post new items on an as-requested basis.

Kurt has said he will start posting to the blog soon. I'm encouraging him to do so, especially now that he has started digitizing and he can post a sample or two each time. That should liven things up around the blog a bit.