Discussion: File trawling?

So how can BoM afford to have its best and brightest in Perth trawling through old files ???????

I was actually coming over here anyway, for another meeting which I spoke at yesterday.

One of the things which perhaps comes as a bit of a surprise in this job is that sometimes the skills required are the sort of document-interpretation more usually associated with historians. Helps a lot (relative to someone untrained doing it) that I know exactly what I'm interested in, and what I'm not - the latter counts for a fair bit, as I'd estimate that I would have looked at somewhere around 10,000 to 15,000 documents while I've been over here and you could get very bogged down if you couldn't dismiss most of them (especially the arguments over money!) immediately. A lot of this type of work has been done in the past by students (including myself in my PhD days) but the only student working in this sort of area has finished searching and started writing (and she was focusing on SE Australia anyway).

Still begs the question as to why the ace forecaster gets converted to historian - is this another sign of the ageing issue (as in being addressed as Mr Trewin?) or has BoM lost its way or are you simply researching for another doctorate in your spare (?) time ......

That sort of reference is totally standard into the 1940s in certain publications but I'm a bit surprised to see it that late. Maybe not for WA though (would not be surprising in qld).
Any time I've sent a student on archive trawling they've missed vital information. Much of what I work on is in collections that have been archived by non-specialist librarians so the metadata tends to be shaky or missing. (My favourite was the tape collection with no labels and the linguist with a speech defeat who pronounced r as w. That made the language names hard to identify...) I imagine you're working with collections with similar problems.