UCF Summer Internship Week #1

Hello, everyone! My name is Nathan Gregg, and welcome to my weekly Summer Internship Blog for the 2025 summer semester. I’m a rising senior at the University of Central Florida, currently majoring in History and pursuing a minor in Florida Studies. I’ve had a long-standing fascination with Florida history since my introduction in the 4th grade, and I’m especially interested in the early Spanish colonial period during the 16th century, as well as the period of U.S. encroachment into Florida during the early 19th century. While separated by hundreds of years of history, I’d argue that both these periods highlight Florida’s past role as one of North America’s truly unique frontiers. It is partly due to my passion for Florida history that I am currently working as a digitization intern with UCF’s CHDR (Center for Humanities and Digital Research) and the NSB MOH (New Smyrna Beach Museum of History) as part of a team aiming to digitize a large collection of historic newspapers from New Smyrna Beach. It’s this internship that I will be blogging about during these next 12 weeks, describing my personal experience working with the project as well as sharing any overall project updates. Although I have been interested in pursuing a career in Public History, recently I've begun to consider archival or preservation work after taking an introductory course on Historic Preservation. I hope that through this experience, I can get a better idea of what career path I would like to pursue post-grad. Furthermore, I’m looking forward to getting hands-on experience with both historical materials and the high-tech scanning equipment needed to digitize them. 

During this week, we had our first team meeting at CHDR in UCF’s Trevor Colbourn Hall to do preliminary introductions, receive instruction on how to operate the scanner, and connect with the staff at the NSB MOH to decide how we will structure the digitization process. Although I was nervous due to my lack of experience in the scanning and digitization of historical documents, it was reassuring to meet the team supervisor, Dr. Shier, and contributing members Dr. Giroux and Justin Whittington. They made sure to inform me, and the other interns, Daniel and Dylan, that due to the complexity of the scanner’s software, they expect it to take a while before we feel comfortable operating the scanner independently. This is due not only to the complexity of the scanner’s software, but its $100,000 price tag as well. The other interns and I also got an opportunity to handle several of the bound volumes of newspapers that we’ll be digitizing within the project. Unfortunately, all but one of them are too big for the current book cradle needed, and as such, interns in the UCF engineering department are designing and constructing a larger cradle to accommodate the others. Although still in good condition, I was surprised by the fragility of even just the 50-year-old newspapers. When I considered how many papers we will be scanning that are even older than this, it struck me how important the digital preservation of these documents is. Our time concluded with a Zoom meeting with Greg and Sandra at the NSB MOH, in which we decided what order to start digitizing the newspapers and organized to have Dr. Giroux pick up some smaller books and unbound newspapers that we can begin scanning without a larger book cradle. By next week, we’ll have this first batch of materials at CHDR and can begin the digitization process in earnest. As of now, I am somewhat apprehensively excited to handle over 100-year-old documents and begin getting more familiar with the digitization process.