Colophon

A colophon is the note at the back of a book that says how the book was made. This one exists because the making matters: the words in this collection are Bob Zybach's and his narrators', and a reader is entitled to know exactly where the Library's hand fell.

The description was built with AI assistance, under the Library's disclosure rule and under human direction. The division of labour was deliberate and narrow. The machines read, extracted, aligned, indexed and linked. They did not write the text a reader reads as the source, and they did not decide what the collection means. The rights posture behind all of it is set out on Rights, use, and takedown.

What was done

• Fetched the public PDFs, photographs, maps and MP3 link registers from nwmapsco.com and orww.org, and recorded a SHA-256 checksum for every file read.
• Read each printed monograph page by page with pdftotext, keeping the printed page number as the citation unit and recording the PDF-to-printed page rule used.
• Recovered speaker turns from the printed typography, and marked every attribution that was inferred rather than printed.
• Rebuilt the series index from the fifteen printed back indexes, merged headings, and resolved page references to chapters.
• Assembled place, person and chronology authorities from the records, geocoding place names against USGS GNIS where a match existed.
• Consolidated the readers' content notes with an independent pattern scan, and kept only high and medium severity notes for display.
• Generated this site's data files from those records, applying the holds and the withheld-place policy.

What was not done

• It did not paraphrase, summarise or rewrite any narrator's or the creator's prose; quoted text is character-for-character from the page.
• It did not correct content. Only obvious OCR artefacts were fixed, and every fix is recorded with page and before/after.
• It did not invent missing values. Fields that could not be filled from the document are null and listed in gaps.
• It did not decide the sensitive questions: content notes, holds and withheld places are flagged for human decision, not resolved.
• It did not verify coordinates in the field; a coordinate carries its method and confidence.

Apparatus is labelled as apparatus

Indexes, place pages, person pages, timelines and maps are the Library's work, built out of Bob's material. They are navigation, not scholarship in the Library's own voice. Every entry in them points back to a printed page you can check, and the pages say when a link was derived rather than stated.

Known problems

These are the ones the Library knows about and has not yet fixed. When one is fixed, the fix is made in the text and recorded on the errata page.

• The printed back indexes of monographs #06 and #07 were compiled against a different pagination and drift by up to two and seven pages. Place and topic entries for those volumes are rebuilt from the transcript text; the printed index is recorded as printed.
• Printed page 107 is missing from monograph #10, and pages 76–77 from #12: gaps in the scan, not in the book.
• Monograph #07 gives its first session as 29 January 1990; the OSU finding aid gives 20 January 1990. Both are recorded; neither has been resolved.
• Recognition of the 1990s typescripts is not perfect. Each item page carries a sampled error rate, and the corrections ledger takes reports.
• Coordinates for places named only in speech are inferred from the name and the surrounding text. They are good enough to navigate by and not good enough to survey by; each one shows its method.

Credits

Interviews, transcription, editing, indexing, photography, maps

Bob Zybach and the interviewers, transcribers and auditors named in each volume's front matter.

Publishers of the originals

OSU Research Forests and College of Forestry; NW Maps Co., the creator's own imprint; Oregon Websites and Watershed Project, Inc.

Preservation of the recordings

OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center (OH 006, OH 047, OH 005, MSS Zybach).

Description and site

America's School Trust Library, built in the open with AI assistance.

Models used

claude-opus-5

Records built

2026-08-27

Sources fetched

2026-08-27

Drive uploads

2026-05-20, 2026-05-21, 2026-06-18, 2026-08-23, 2026-08-24

Data generated

2026-08-27

Provenance · Content note · Rights, use, and takedown · Errata · Editorial standards · Submit a correction · How corrections work