Digitization Internship II Day 2

Today was a bit of a mix thanks to my supervisor having other things to tend to and tours being led through the digital projects lab. When things settled down, my supervisor asked me for my thoughts on what metadata fields would make this one collection more useful to student researchers. I suggested:

• Short description of content for each book.
• OCR text to be added so it could be searched.
• A better design layout since the giant “Click folder for access” image which leads the student off-site is off-putting.

We then discussed another project which he wants me to help lead on how to handle it. That makes me nervous but the atmosphere in the lab leaves me with a very warm feeling. David is very supportive of his interns and student workers. We can chat a bit, make each other laugh, and never are we made to feel ashamed to ask questions. It is the sort of environment that I hope to foster in my own digital projects lab someday.

Next, he gave me some “grunt work” (which I don’t mind doing since I tend to be meticulous!) of downloading the OCR text and jpegs that the Internet Archives produced for us. I completed 55 years today and nearly each year had four folders within it. The work as follows:

• Right click on the magazine link and open it in a new tab.
• Click on “Access this file” to check to make sure that the year in the title matched the actual files.
• Click on the full URL of the object, then on a link that takes you to a list of all files that make up the object.
• In the download folder, make a folder for each year and then a folder for each object.
• Most magazines were by month, so to make it easy to organize them, I used a two digit code which corresponds to the month’s order. For example, October is 10 so the folder name would be “10 October.”
• Right click and save the OCR text and the zipped images to its specific folder.
• Repeat.