UCF Summer Internship Week #6

Welcome back to Week #6 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. This past week, I’ve traveled to Orcas Island in northern Washington state for a family reunion with my mother’s side. As such, I’ve dedicated my time this past week exclusively to metadata entry for the project. This involves reviewing the project’s uploaded scans in Microsoft Teams™ and entering the newspaper’s name, location of publication, binding type, date of publication, volume/issue number, page number, and whether each paper uses color or black and white ink. The final task is to examine the corresponding JPEG previews uploaded along with all the TIFF images to assess each page’s physical condition. This is initially described in a column labeled “Damage,” using a scale ranging from “Very Minor” to “Major.” It is then elaborated upon in a “Comments” column. The most common types of damage noted in these comments include tears in the paper, missing portions/holes, creasing, ink fading, or staining. Since many pages may exhibit multiple types of damage, I focus my comments on the tears, holes, etc. that obstruct textual data. For instance, a page might have a large horizontal tear on its mid-left side that obscures text, along with several missing pieces in the page’s blank margins. In my comment on that page, I would mention the tear, as it is the only form of damage that actually affects the textual data.

Of those pages I examined this past week, there were a large number of papers with horizontal tearing on the middle fold of the page. Around 20 of these pages from several 1909 issues of the New Smyrna Breeze were even completely torn through the center, and the paper had started to fray at the center split. For some pages, this would obscure several lines of writing, while others could be better lined up to preserve the legibility of the textual data. Depending on the amount of text lost, I listed the damage as being at a “Moderate” or “Minor” level. Other than these split pages, there was a collection of papers from 1891 that seemed to have been damaged by a cockroach, likely a “palmetto bug.” This is due to the unusually dark staining and small holes found on the page. Since many of these papers have been stored in Florida for decades, if not more than a century, I’m surprised that the other interns and I have not discovered more signs of insect damage to the paper material. No matter what type of damage is present, if it obscures any textual data, it's important to record this metadata for those using these scans in the future.

UCF Summer Internship Week #5

            Hello again! And welcome back to Week #5 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. This week, we continued our work digitizing the unbound New Smyrna Breeze newspapers from the early 20th century. At this point, we are close to completing scanning for all unbound copies of the Breeze, and we have only a few copies from the early 1930s left. On Tuesday, Daniel came in the morning and got a start working on the papers on his own before I showed up later that day around noon. This worked well as I was able to take over when he had to head out in the mid-afternoon, and by the time I finished up, we had around 180 scans completed in the session(our single-day record). I was quite excited about this team improvement until I began the process of exporting these images to our project hard drive as TIFFs and saw an estimated wait time of more than two hours. This meant that I not only had to wait the two hours for the TIFF files to export, but the JPG copies after that, and then both versions would need to be uploaded to Microsoft Teams for metadata entry. While the estimated time soon settled at around an hour and a half, I felt like this was a bit longer than I would expect, even for such a large number of high-resolution TIFF files. This led me to look closer at the computer's drive, and I found several redundant folders where scanned images had been uploaded to our external drive as well as the computer’s. I deleted the folders after making absolutely sure that nothing essential would be lost, and since then, the export process has seemed to be back to normal speeds. While large sessions can still take well over an hour to complete the export and upload process, I now at least have a much better understanding of when I should aim to finish a scanning session.

While having more hands-on help in the CHDR offices has certainly sped up the scanning process, it's also contributed to some organizational issues. As we have three different people removing and returning newspapers from one box, it's gotten fairly disordered. One day this week, after we had a particularly hard time locating a paper we wanted rescanned, Daniel suggested an organizational day that could be spent on reorganizing the box of unbound newspapers before we return them to the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. Daniel asked about somewhere we could write down any secondary tasks, and Dr. Shier found a sticky note easel to make the list on. I thought this was a good way to keep track of anything we’re worried we may forget, and a good example of the organizational and project management skills needed when working on a team project.

UCF Summer Internship Week #4

    Hello again, everyone! Welcome to Week #4 of my Summer Internship with both CHDR and the NSB MOH. This past week marked the first time that all three team interns were in the CHDR offices simultaneously, scanning materials and entering metadata into the project master spreadsheet. For Dylan and me, it was our first chance to gain experience with the data entry aspect of the project. For the third intern, Daniel, this was his first hands-on experience using the scanner, as he had been working remotely on the metadata so far this summer. This collaboration worked out well because Daniel could provide guidance on how to enter the data, and in turn, we could answer any questions he had about operating the scanner. We continued scanning the unbound newspapers this week and are close to completing the box. At this point, we have officially finished all the newspapers from the 19th century and have begun digitizing those from the early 20th century, but unfortunately, there are some significant gaps in the record. By the time we finish this first collection of papers, we will have scanned all existing copies of the New Smyrna Breeze newspaper from before 1933. 

Although this week marked my first time doing data entry work for this particular project, I have prior experience from a past project at UCF. This earlier project focused on documenting Black businesses in Orlando's historic Parramore neighborhood. As part of an assignment for my American Capitalism and Democracy course, we worked on a portion of the project spreadsheet, color-coding the types of businesses. Because of this previous experience, I felt much more at ease this week entering metadata. With all three interns in the office, we were able to organize the team more efficiently and identify a list of current tasks we need to complete in the near future (i.e., organizing the already scanned material for transport back to the NSB MOH, reuploading missing JPEGs to the proper Microsoft Teams folders, etc.). Dr. Shier provided us with a large notepad easel to write this to-do list on, which has been extremely helpful in reminding us of additional tasks outside of scanning and data entry. While we progress further into the early 20th century, most papers have improved in condition, yet we still encounter rare examples of extremely worn paper that we must handle very carefully. Unfortunately, on Thursday, Dylan and I discovered several papers that had split in half, and it took a considerable amount of time to piece them together and scan.