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Reflection

This internship was a wonderful learning experience. I really enjoyed getting to learn how to work the machine, and it is a valuable skill to have. The skills I learned using this scanner will be transferable to other, similar machines and helps me in the learning process of working with different forms of technology and getting to know them for professional use.

The learning curve was pretty easy to master. After the first book, I got a lot faster at using the scanner. I learned what to do to make the process go smoothly and to keep my mind occupied during the rather repetitive parts of this internship. It was peaceful and enjoyable to me. While scanning the pages, I usually either listened to and sang hymns that I found on YouTube or listened to the Bible being read aloud. Sometimes I also listened to some historical songs that I grew up with, but it was mostly either the hymns or the Bible, which was wonderful to do while scanning hymnals.

It was great to see some of the skills I already had from other systems being put to use here, such as editing out the thumb on the pages was quite similar to things I already learned in Photoshop. In fact, Photoshop's abilities are more precise for that, so if we want to consider adding an extra step of photo editing into this to make the removal of the thumb cleaner and smoother, we might consider using Photoshop in the future. On the system the scanner comes with, it automatically takes pixels from the surrounding area, but for Photoshop, you can tell it precisely which pixels to take to duplicate, which would solve the problems of if it starts getting too close to the text or anything else that might mess it up (sometimes a shadow, for example), it will not have that glitch-y look as often.

It was great to get to work with several different types of files to export to. My personal favorite was the .web files, even though two of the books, for some reason we still have not been able to figure out yet, did not want to convert to that file type. But I liked that it could simulate a book, virtually, where it had graphics that made it look like you were turning the page. It is very satisfying to me to see it presented that way.

For Lady Huntingdon's book, there was a time when it did not want to export the images to any file type, but we figured out that the error message was telling us that it could not properly read the file location, and the reason for that was because there were characters in the title (a "/" I believe) that made it read something in the title as if it was a part of the location the file should be saved to, so we were able to fix that, but that did not seem to be the problem for the .web files, so unfortunately we do not have that solved yet. They will have to figure it out without me.

I did want to write up transcripts of the training videos for future interns, and I think I will continue working on it after school ends and send it as soon as I can, but unfortunately I do not think I will be able to finish the transcripts before the end of the semester. It is still something I will work on though, and I will have it available soon.

I will love to know when the scanned books will go live and be accessible online for people to look at. I look forward to when it will be made available to everyone. I think this is absolutely worth it, because those books are beautiful, and they have a wonderful history with our founding president of CBU (then CBC), and while it is understandable then, especially because of the age and condition of some of those books, the books are not easily accessible to students, especially without supervision, it is a shame that they are locked in a back room and not able to be used as books should be. 

Books are not things to be locked away, they are meant to be used and to pass on their knowledge. I enjoyed working with these books in one of my English classes, which was how I found out about the internship, and I think other English classes, other Modern Languages and Literature classes (there are books in there in multiple languages!) as well as CBU's music department and maybe also the history department and the Christian Studies department could use these books. I am sure there are Latin books available that could be interesting for the students of CBU's Latin classes. Getting these books accessible to more people will mean they will not be going to waste, so I fully support this internship.

This internship helped me realize my love for archiving, working with artifacts, and preserving history, and since I am looking into working at museums when I move to Washington D.C. after school, the skills I learned in this internship will definitely be useful to me. It was wonderful to work with Morgan Vandiver, Prof. Alspach and Dr. Emerson for the project, and to talk with Prof. Tronti every week about my progress. I would like to thank everyone who helped with this process. This internship was fun and informative, and a good experience for me for what I would like to do in my future career. I wish the rest of this project the best and eagerly wait for when our hard work will go live and be made available to use as it should be. Knowledge should be shared, history should be preserved, and books should be read, and I am glad I got to have even a small part in this process. I hope I will do more of this in my future.