UCF Summer Internship Week #2

Hello everyone, and welcome to Week #2 of my Summer Internship with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research at UCF's College of the Arts and Humanities. While the first week of the internship was primarily spent planning out the structure of the overall project, it was this second week that I received my first hands-on experience with the scanner. Although we are still unable to scan many of the large bound newspaper books, Dr. Giroux drove to the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History (NSB MoH) this Monday to pick up a large collection of unbound newspapers, which can be scanned without a book cradle. Besides simply being unbound and easier to scan, these newspapers are the oldest at the museum and are in desperate need of preservation. Based on the plan we devised with the NSB MoH, these newspapers were the first documents scanned. As this was our first time actually operating the equipment, Dylan and I figured we should come in and work together at a time when Dr. Shier was in the office. Since the papers wouldn’t get there til late in the day on Monday, Dr. Shier let us know he would be in the office on Tuesday morning, and our keycards to the CHDR offices would be activated at that time. 

When I got to the space on Tuesday morning, Dr. Shier made sure to run through the process again and helped us get everything set up for our first scanning session. We started with the oldest of the papers, a 1887 Vol. 1, Iss. 1 copy of one of New Smyrna’s oldest newspapers, the “New Smyrna Breeze.” Immediately, the pros and cons of working with such old material became apparent. On the one hand, these newspapers from the late 19th century used no color. Luckily for Dylan and me, this meant that we could skip the process of checking the color saturation, and this made the setup slightly easier. On the other hand, their old age meant that these papers were extremely fragile and already fairly badly damaged. This made taking each paper out and flipping or rotating any pages extremely difficult. The edges of pages would often stick together, pages would be in multiple pieces like a puzzle, and words would be covered by creases or cracks in the paper. Although I initially quite enjoyed handling documents older than my great-grandfather, the novelty began to wear off by the second day and was quickly replaced by frustration at the painstaking focus it took just to flip a page without damaging the document. Although their fragility frustrated me, it also reminded me of the importance of the project. While many people may think that preserving old newspapers from a small town in Florida is not a major priority, if not for this project between CHDR and the NSB MoH, these documents would likely be forever lost to future generations. It's certainly not the New York Times, but the information in these papers has value to future generations that cannot be predicted and must be saved.