Hello! Welcome back to Week #9 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. Due to last Friday being Independence Day, there was no blog posted for Week #8, but as of this week, I am officially back in-person at the CHDR offices in sunny (and very hot) Orlando, FL. Currently, I'm back continuing work on the large format scanner, digitizing historical newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach area. However, while I was away, Dylan and Daniel completed the scanning for all unbound newspapers and officially started on the bound copies! As of now, the only bound books we can scan are issues of The Pelican, a New Smyrna Beach paper from the 1950s and 1960s that primarily focuses on fishing news and local events. This is because the book must be placed into a book cradle to make the pages lie flat for scanning, and our current cradle can only fit The Pelican's smaller bound volumes. Since I was inexperienced with using the book cradle, I contacted Dylan and we coordinated to come in at the same time this past Monday so he could run me through the process. Although it's fairly straightforward, there are a few key differences with how you organize the scans that I was glad Dylan could show me in person. First, he walked me through setting up the session so that all scans would appear properly numbered and in the right order, before then completing one batch himself. He then had me go through and scan a few batches myself to get the hang of it. While nothing was confusing, there are certainly a few details that if not remembered will result in a lot of headache and backtracking, especially when scanning several hundred pages. The most exciting part is definitely how good the condition of the books are when compared to the unbound newspapers we started with. While it was certainly exciting to work with historical material from the 1800s, the ease of scanning these much more sturdy bound copies is a nice change of pace. While the number varies, each book seems to be about 600-650 pages long and takes us about 2-3 days to scan. At that rate, I’m hoping we can get all copies of The Pelican scanned before the end of the summer but I would say the biggest potential problem is the amount of data it takes to store these high resolution scans. While we have several one terabyte drives, a typical session can produce well over 100 gigabytes of data.
