Worst. Documentation. Ever.

So I finally got around to working on my dissertation this afternoon and my advisor set me up with a new dataset that's related (conceptually) to the one I'm using and may contain some data that we may be able to use as validation for our work. So I'm trying to get this other dataset up and running and it comes in several pieces with some read me files about how it all goes together and how it was collected and blah blah blah. So how might this documentation be provided? These pages and pages of manuals and protocols and sample surveys? Why, with every single page as a separate TIF file, of course! Good grief!

Update - on the 754th of 983 files I finally found what I was looking for - the table translating variable names within the database.