UCF Summer Internship Week #11

        Hello! Welcome back to my weekly summer internship blog as I continue my work with UCF’s CHDR and the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History (NSB MoH). As the summer semester ends, the other interns and I are still working on digitizing bound copies of NSB’s historic Pelican newspaper from the 1950s and 1960s. Although we often work at different times in the office, this past week, Dylan, Daniel, and I have all been there at the same time, and it’s been working well. With several of us in the office together, I’ve been able to focus on metadata entry while Dylan or Daniel process and upload new scans of the Pelican. Since Daniel usually comes in early in the morning, he’s been able to complete many scans before Dylan arrives to crop and upload them. Dividing the work this way lets us scan more pages each day without anyone staying in the office longer than needed. For me, focusing on metadata entry has been especially helpful this past week because I’ve been dealing with a bad sore throat and cough. With Daniel handling scanning and Dylan cropping and uploading, I can concentrate on catching up with metadata. This setup is especially convenient because I don’t have to worry about a slow upload speed keeping me in the office longer than I should be. Additionally, Daniel recently discovered a shortcut in Teams that allows us to see JPEG previews of each scan while entering metadata, without opening each file in a separate window and reloading the page. Although it seems like a small change, being able to view scans without reloading greatly speeds up the process and has allowed me to enter more data this past week than ever before. Another good update is that, with everyone in the office together, Daniel had extra time to look for the July 31, 1891, copy of The New Smyrna Breeze, and he finally found it! Dylan calls it Daniel’s “white whale,” since he’s been wanting to rescan it for over a month after realizing he hadn’t centered it properly, causing some text to be cut off. In the past, he couldn’t find it in the box of unbound papers from the NSB MoH, but now it’s been scanned and uploaded to the right folder. Besides working in person with the other interns last week, the CHDR offices also underwent some remodeling, with new chairs and tables brought in and the room rearranged.

UCF Summer Internship Week #10

Welcome back to Week #10 of my summer internship at UCF’s CHDR. This past week, I’ve continued to work on the scanning and digitization of historic newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. Specifically, I continued scanning the bound copies of The Pelican that fellow interns Dylan and Daniel started on while I was out of the office. As of now, we’ve completed the 1951-52, 1952-53, and 1953-54 volumes of the newspaper and are close to being finished with the 1954-55 volume. While in the past, the most challenging aspect of digitization was handling the fragile, unbound newspapers, when working with the large bound volumes, it's quite easy to scan a large number of pages in quick succession. As I’ve worked on my own with the book cradle, I’ve gotten a lot better at positioning the book so as to isolate each page for the scanner to capture. While some small adjustments are needed to ensure the captures come out flat and level, this makes the cropping much easier later on. This is especially important because as you scan more pages in a session, you end up significantly increasing the amount of time you must spend cropping. If you’re sloppy while scanning the pages, then not only do you run the risk of not capturing all the pages’ data, but you increase the amount of work needed on the backend when processing these images for upload. 

Uploading the images to Microsoft Teams is another area that can take a surprisingly long amount of time. Although the computer we use to upload scans has a high-speed Ethernet connection, which allows for upload speeds of more than 100 Mbps, the Microsoft Teams application/website itself can be fairly fickle. Just this past week, Dylan and I came in on the same day and completed a scanning session that produced around 63 GB worth of images. When we went to upload this collection, I was pleasantly surprised by the speed of the upload. All in all, the whole thing took around 20-30 minutes. The next day, I was in the office working on my own, and I had finished cropping earlier than expected, so I decided to complete a few more scans than I originally planned. Before I began the upload, I noticed the file was about 68 GB and figured it would take around 35-40 minutes at most to upload to Teams. Unfortunately, the upload ended up taking almost 1 hour and 20 minutes to complete. Although I checked the computer’s connection speed and found it was still capable of uploading over 100 Mbps, the Teams website showed a much slower speed. After looking around online, I believe it to be a problem with the website that occurs when a file is directly dragged and dropped into a folder rather than selected for upload through the website’s own upload interface.

UCF Summer Internship Week #9

     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.