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.