NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Five (2/13/2026)

     Hello! Welcome back to my Spring 2026 internship blog, digitizing historic newspapers from New Smyrna Beach at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR). In Week Five, we continued the task of digitizing the 1956-1957 copies of the Pelican newspaper, uploading them to Microsoft Teams and entering the relevant metadata for these scans. As well as these regular tasks, I spent a lot of time working on the administrative and data management aspects of the project. This is something I am increasingly spending my time on, as we have a much larger team of five interns working on the project this semester, rather than just the three of us who were part of the Summer 2025 team. In terms of administrative tasks, we had a partial team meeting on Wednesday with me, Dylan, Dr. Shier, and Caitlin. We discussed best practices when entering metadata and talked about potential ways to better store the digitized pages and their corresponding metadata. As Caitlin is a Computer Science major, it was very interesting to hear her insights and ideas on how we could better organize metadata to make it easier for future teams to transfer this information to a website. She also suggested she could work on a mock-up web page, which could model potential ways to present the scanned pages, and which Dr. Shier could then send to the people at the New Smyrna Museum of History for feedback. As we don’t have any specifics on how the NSMoH wants these scans stored/displayed, I think it sounded like an excellent way to provide them with some ideas of how they would best like to store/present them. Although I did the regular scanning and uploading on Tuesday, after we wrapped up the meeting on Wednesday, I spent the rest of that afternoon and Thursday afternoon working on consolidating all our finished scans on one hard drive. Although we upload to Microsoft Teams after every scanning session, we tend to keep a backup of recent uploads on an external drive just in case there are any mistakes or missing scans that we catch afterwards. However, we had started accidentally spreading these across several identical-looking drives, as it's easy to mistake one for the other. Although I expected this to be a fairly straightforward task, as I worked my way through the various file folders, I found quite a few misnumbered uploads. Luckily, I was able to fix these issues by manually going through and renaming each file. After finishing this, I made sure to write down a few notes on how to avoid misnumbering scans and left that by the scanner start-up instructions.