Week 4-

 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 accessed by us easily.

    Other than that I started working on a metadata form for the 64-65 scrap book that we got from Howard just to make sure we are doing it properly I plan to ask one of the employees at the CHDR to look it over once it is more complete. I also need to clarify that while we do the metadata do we do a item for each individual say news paper clipping, or will we just have one for each page? I assume it’s the former but this is something that I failed to ask the CHDR team member I talked with about the metadata initially. Something that I'd like to figure out how to do is add images to the excel sheet where the inventory is, just so there's a visualization of each item outside of RICHES, whenever it is uploaded there it wont be as much of a issue but until the items are with how faded some of the markings for dates are it just may be helpful for the scrap books to tell at a glance which one is which.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer week 1

 This summer semester will be a continuation of last semesters Howard digitization project. This first week there's not much to discuss, sending emails to get things restarted, much of the decisions for this week were done during the last week of last semester. This week I showed the new undergraduate intern the basics of how the capture one software and the titan scanner worked. We redid scans of two of the banners with the hopes that next week we will be able to get these put together with Photoshop automatically by providing more overlap between the images, if this fails we will have to learn how to put the images together manually, which may mean yet another re-scan as if the Photoshop algorithm cant put the images together I have concerns that we wont be able too. We also discovered that some of the materials may well be moved due to construction and reconstruction at the school, this increases the likely-hood that some of the items may be misplaced, or worse, mistook for tras...
Read more

Summer week 2

  This week was used to both redo the banners (yet again) and preview the other materials that were borrowed from Howard before the school all but shut down for construction over the summer. I met with Mike Shier from the CHDR and went over how to manually do the Photoshop combining of banners, the first thing that was apparently is that the algorithm failed to produce a combined images likely because the images couldn’t be aligned i.e manually moving the   images until things lined up still resulted in another part of the image not lining up.   Mike then suggested redoing the images so that there are four takes of the banner instead of the 16 or so that we redid last week, this gives less points of potential failure; after all redoing four images is far easier than redoing 16. However this may come at a slight cost, that being the DPI; the capture one scanner at full height can’t fails to focus when trying a DPI at the 600 minimum that Dublin core wants for the TIFF fi...
Read more

Week 1- Introduction and initial impressions

 I'm Matthew Austin, a second semester graduate student in UCF's Public History program whose areas of interest are labor  and civil rights history. This internship with Howard middle school is a opportunity to get some experience in what public history is, working with groups outside your institution and hopefully helping to tell their story. While at Howard Middle we had the chance to look at some of the scrap books that had been made over the years dating back to the, I think at least, mid-40's; not only does this give us a chance to look at what was important to the individual who made the scrap books but what the Orlando news deemed important enough to be published in the news paper.  My hope with this internship is to gain skills that could be useful in a post graduate job or for other Internships, but also to opportunity to participate in what I would can only describe as a community history project.  While I have doubts we will be able to go through a lot o...
Read more