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.