UCF Summer Internship Week #3

         Welcome to Week #3 of my Summer internship with UCF's Center for the Humanities and Digital Research in partnership with the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. This week, we continued our work on digitizing the oldest collection of newspapers, primarily made up of unbound papers from the 19th century. Fortunately, as we've worked our way through the oldest papers, the condition of the documents has definitely improved. While there are still obvious signs of wear on the paper (stains, deep creases, tears, etc.), the pages at this stage are intact, and this has allowed Dylan and me to work a lot quicker this past week. Although this is not to say that this week was without its challenges. One challenge this week arose when we found several full spread newspapers that had to be totally unfolded to capture every page. These differed from the multi-page papers we had previously seen, which were folded along one line like a binding and meant to be read like pages of a book. This was a problem because not only were these full spread papers very easy to damage when flipping them while unfolded, but we weren’t sure if we should scan the whole spread or scan by page. Dr. Shier suggested we scan the whole spread and just label it as a spread in the file name as a way to preserve the different physical layout of the full spread papers. I thought this was interesting because my initial reaction was to devise a standard order to scan the individual pages of all full spread newspapers to keep the scans as standardized as possible. But Dr. Shier made a good point about the preservation of these documents and suggested that by scanning the full spread we would be preserving the different physical layouts that were used by the New Smyrna Breeze. This was interesting to me because throughout the early stages of this project I’ve been preoccupied with standardizing the scans to try and make them look orderly and professional when all collected together. However, Dr. Shier helped to remind me that not every scan can look the same. Some will simply have to look different because of how the papers are structured or the condition they’re in and to try and I realized how trying to smooth out these differences misunderstands the point of preservation. At the same time it was somewhat relieving to hear that not every scan is expected to fit the same format and that its up to me to decide how best to preserve the papers.