This volume is about general maintenance of established westernization of the villages located just outside of the city of Port Moresby but within the geographical area of Port Moresby. Maintenance includes routine census, health and hygiene checkups, road evaluations, agriculture, and native villager observations. Some reports include inquiries, requests and payments of Native Compensation for War Damage.

Reflection:

As most of the others in class have expressed before, reports within an entire volume can vary from subject matter to even basic format of how things are reported that it makes it very difficult to capture everything thing in a 3-4 sentence aboutness statement. So I find myself continually going back to the approach as if I was a researcher and types of expectations I would have in searching the archives of PNG. Mainly what kinds of summaries, abstracts and statements would I expect to see that would help do a quick filter for anything specific that I was searching for but also information that may be useful in terms of possible terms, subjects or avenues that may be explored if what was originally intended for this search is highly linked to these other ideas in the summaries/abstracts/statements.

So my approach is  extracting the repeating topics in reports and also making sure that I included the highlight of the war compensation program that may be of interest for this period of time in PNG history. That way if you’re not searching for the routine reports that talk about health/hygiene, roads, etc., then maybe the Native Compensation for War Damage is something of interest. And vice versa, perhaps a medical researcher is interested in the standards and protocols of health, they’ll be able to quickly add this volume into their collection to exam and later start to go through the volume to see if these reports are actually the types of information they are seeking.

I was fortunate enough to have reports that had clear delineations of the types of reporting within each reports but I think that for others not so fortunate, looking for recurring themes amongst all the reports may be a starting pointing point of what to include in the aboutness statement.

PNG Patrol Report: Central District, Port Moresby, 1946-1948