Another surprise was the amount of notecards that are associated with one another. While some cards contain a short one-line joke, other jokes span several cards. These collections of cards had originally been paper-clipped together, but at some point in the life of the gag file the paper clips were removed. This removal was great in terms of preservation because paper clips tend to rust and cause damage to the surface to which they have been attached. But the removal also made it difficult to decipher which cards were originally associated with one another. I was able to use the bend marks on cards as well as rust marks from where a paper clip used to be to record which joke cards were most likely originally paper-clipped together. This association is important to note because some individual cards only hold a portion of a longer joke and therefore do not make sense independently.

This joke card has a comic clipped from a newspaper glued to it. During the digitization process, the index card was put in a clear Mylar sleeve to prevent the comic, with its brittle glue, from being damaged or separated from the card.

While most of the joke cards are simply index cards with a joke typed on, others are more complicated. Some cards have strips of paper glued to them with longer jokes on those papers. Some cards have entire letter-size sheets of paper containing long jokes stapled to the cards. Some cards have comic strips, cut from the newspaper, glued to the cards. Other cards are not even cards but are just pieces of printer paper with jokes scribbled on them. These irregular cards were not stable enough to be sent through the feed scanner and had to be scanned one-by-one using a flatbed scanner, which slowed my progress.