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.