The unfinished memories

For three years, volunteers had collected handwritten memories for a community booklet. When I began preparing them for publication, several sheets carried no contributor's name. Some writers referred to events as happening ‘last year’, but the sheets did not show when they had been written. One long account had arrived as a bundle of unnumbered pages, leaving me uncertain about their order. Another contributor had supplied two different endings without identifying the final version. In several places, extra sentences had been written in the margins, with arrows pointing towards more than one possible position in the text.

Describe the difficulties of preparing the memories for publication. You may support your points with brief quotations.