UCF Howard Middle School Internship

 This week was spent doing the training for the CHDR's titan scanner. While I failed to get pictures the process is fairly straight forward to explain. You start a session, pick the correct settings and from there adjust the white balance and exposure as necessary to get the image toward a neutral gray, and then you adjust from there down to a more whiteish image. It's a fairly involved set up requiring you to remember a exact set of steps and settings but once that;s done the work is straight forward enough, it's just getting to the point where you're comfortable with the software. Besides the scanner I got around to adding all the items we took pictures of to the excel sheet for inventory purposes. Next week we will meet and hopefully scan in the items we have so the real work on transcription can begin with higher quality images, working from a phone camera images are fine with how today's cameras are but having these high res images is more important for  RICHES...

 Overall this has been a slow week, trying to get meetings arranged for the CHDR scanner, that training happens next week. But that aside we have started working on the metadata sheets for the first few pages of the 64-65 scrapbook. Next week the plan is that we will ideally have higher quality images to work off of instead of just those taken with my phone, allowing for easier reading of the documents for transcription.  The scanning shouldn't take along and hopefully can all be done in a few minutes to a hour, both for the scrapbook and the banners. Once the training is done the biggest thing will be making sure we have access to the scanner via a appointment system that the CHDR has. This will hopefully led to few or no conflicts with other events going on in the lab space.     Once the scanning is done the real work of filling out the metadata and transcribing the items on each page will begin.  Thankfully however most of these documents are typed out a...

 This week has been one of frustrations, emails and scheduling issues. This is by no means one individuals fault, having to work around 3-4 peoples schedules and CHDR's operating hours has just shown how many issues a project like this can have.  Between not having access to CHDR's lab at any time with the (understandable) requirement that there be a staff member of CHDR present in case there are any issues, trying to learn how to use the capture one software the scanner uses only for something to not work, and just trying to navigate scheduling issues between three people reminds us that projects like this are not as smooth as we'd like them to be.       This just comes with the fact that we're working within a university's constraints. UCF is not a archive, it does not have a large team available 24/7 for people to work with archival material or enough people to train you on how to use the equipment. I'm not blaming UCF for anything, that's just how ...

 This week was simple, we went to Howard middle school and more or less did inventory. My reasoning for this was so we could make a excel sheet that could be added to by any future work to keep track of what's done, what’s in progress and how many of each item (mostly the year books) were in the collection that Howard has. We took photos of each item just to have images prior to the real digitization to mabyte use as a place holder in either the excel sheet or the metadata form while we’re making sure everything is correct. The current plan is to meet next week in order to learn how to use the CHDR scanner so we can start the process of digitizing the banners and scrap books. However that has it's own limitations with when we can work in the CHDR, talking with a professor she can only let work be done at a time when there is staff there in the event there is technical difficulties. However we now have a confirmed location on campus where  the materials can be stored and...