NSMxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Two (1/23/2026)

Hello! And welcome back to Week Two of my Spring 2026 Internship Blog with UCF’s CHDR and the New Smyrna Museum of History. As we’ve begun this semester, some new challenges and opportunities have arisen with the project. The most significant of these has been an issue with the large-format Titan scanner, which is used for all of our project’s newspaper digitization. More specifically, there was an issue with the CaptureOne software, which connects to the camera of the Titan scanner, and is needed to capture, edit, and temporarily store all digital images. For some unknown reason, the program would unexpectedly crash just a few seconds after it was launched, and my fellow interns and I could not find anything in the computer's files that would indicate why this was happening. Unfortunately, this meant we were not able to begin the process of scanning this week and had to focus on other tasks until this was solved. However, the Associate Director of CHDR, Brook Miller, was able to look at the problem on Wednesday and very graciously offered to contact the company and set up an online meeting to try and fix it. Even though we were all disappointed to not begin scanning this week, it was a major relief when Brook informed us at the end of the day Thursday that the scanner was fixed and fully operational! 

Also on Thursday, Dylan and I got the opportunity to lead our first meeting for the internship. While we had an initial introduction meeting on Wednesday of Week One, this was the first meeting where only the student interns were present. I realized that morning that this was not just my first time leading a meeting with this team, but actually my first experience leading any meeting in a professional setting. Although I was a little nervous, it was a great opportunity to see how to best organize our time to make sure everything was covered that needed to be. It was also nice to get to know Jack, Caitlin, and Thomas a little better and settle any concerns they had as new team members. We got them added to the Microsoft Team for the project, so they can now work on metadata from home if they need to complete a few more hours for the week. We also familiarized them with the reservation system that CHDR has for the Titan scanner, something that is very important, as this is the first time this project has been active during a Spring or Fall semester (when a lot more events and teams are using the workspace). By the end of next week, we should have Jack and Caitlin’s ID cards finally added to the CHDR system, and they’ll be able to come and go whenever. In the meantime, we set up a time for everyone to come in on Monday at 3 pm to get the first scans of the semester finally underway!