NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Seven (2/27/2026)

 Hello! Welcome to Week Seven of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week, we continued our work scanning the 1957-1958 volume of The Pelican. While we have been making good progress in the project so far, I'm hoping we can increase the rate of scans per day to ensure we get about one volume scanned every two weeks. Getting about 100 scans per day would make that possible, but as of now, we're closer to a daily rate of 50-100. This is somewhat due to the fact that we share the CHDR workspace with other Humanities departments who use it for special events, and these are much more active during the spring semester (as opposed to the summer, when I first started working on this project). Other than that, I devoted a lot of my hours the past few weeks to working on renumbering and reuploading any misnumbered/missing files from previous scanning sessions, and this has meant I haven't gotten to scan as much. As I move back into spending the majority of my time scanning, and the new interns get more comfortable with the machine, I expect we can easily hit the one book scanned every two weeks mark. It's exciting to think that by the end of the semester, we'll almost certainly have scanned all available copies of the Pelican. 

    This past week, I spent most of my time going through past uploads and making a list of all the fixes, major or minor, that need to be done with the past uploads, and then began knocking some of those off. It's all pretty boring stuff like manually renumbering files, but I was happy to find out a new way to retrieve former image files, which I thought we would have to convert ourselves. I looked at some ways to potentially upload the larger folders containing misnumbered files into another website, which would then let me renumber multiple files at once (as Microsoft Teams doesn't have this function), but the ones I found would not work the way I wanted them to. On the bright side, Thomas let me know that we have officially caught up with the present semester's scans in the metadata spreadsheet, and Caitlin set up a Zoom meeting with someone at the New Smyrna Museum of History to discuss how they want to go about digitally archiving and presenting the scanned pages to the public. I'm waiting to hear back from Dylan, more about how it went, as I was unable to attend, but I'm looking forward to establishing the next goals for the project and any future team members.

       

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NSMxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week One (1/16/2026)

Hello everyone! And welcome to Week One of my Spring 2026 Blog as part of my internship with the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) and the New Smyrna Museum of History. This internship is a continuation of the work I undertook over the Summer of 2025, in which two other interns and I began the digitization of historic newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach area, with the ultimate goal of creating a publicly accessible online newspaper database. To briefly reintroduce myself, my name is Nathan Gregg, and I am an undergraduate senior History major at the University of Central Florida with a minor in Florida Studies. As my minor suggests, I have a specific interest in Florida history, particularly in historic Florida newspapers and periodicals. While this blog will cover the same project as in my Summer 2025 internship, a separate series seems appropriate to cover my new role as a Co-Lead of the Spring 2026 internship team. Luckily for me and my fellow Co-Lead/returning ...
Read more

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 l...
Read more

NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Eleven (3/27/2026)

     Hello again! Welcome to Week Eleven of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week, we continued scanning the 1958-59 edition of The Pelican , and we are just a few issues away from completing it. Dylan and Jack both came in on Monday and were able to get over a hundred scans done, but as usual, I didn't come into the office until Tuesday after my class. As I was close to finalizing my organizational "To Do List" of things to fix with the uploaded scans before the end of the semester, I continued to work on that. By the end of the day, I had finalized the list, and I now have a master list of every file that needs renumbering, renaming, reuploaded image files, etc. Not only was I quite happy to have everything written down and organized, but I was surprised by how many issues I had already fixed and just forgotten to cross off. As of now, I'm hopeful that the re...
Read more