The joys of proofreading

For anyone who thinks proofreading takes only a few minutes, I submit the following: The Lögberg-Heimskringla Future Fund Capital Campaign donor wall.

What you see in the photo are the second set of proofs from John Henry Creations, who are building the permanent donor recognition wall which will list all donors to the Future Fund campaign, and the people donors wished to honour. At last count this was something like 1200 names AT LEAST — an overwhelming show of support for L-H from the Icelandic community.

Karen and I proofed the donor matrix every time we published donors' names in the newspaper, and made corrections based on phone calls, e-mails and letters from donors. We also pulled out all the original donor cards and checked our matrix against every donation when we sent the final matrix to John Henry. Karen also called many of the donors to doublecheck things that seemed "not quite right." Then the whole matrix had to be set at John Henry, and we received proofs of the panels for the donor wall.

We went through all of those names again and checked them against our master list.

After we noted corrections to be made, we asked John Henry Creations for another set of "final" proofs — just to be sure we hadn't missed anything. After looking at multiple spellings of Kristjanson, Kristjansson, Kristjánsson (and many other common Icelandic names), we knew we'd have to go over everything at least one more time.

This was many hours of work... Karen has gone over the whole matrix and noted corrections to be made, now I am doing the same.

We still plan to have a donor wall unveiling at the L-H office before Christmas.