Other assignments

My two big projects in the Digi Lab were Frobenius metadata and scanning cookbooks, but there were a few other projects that I got to work on as well.

One was inventorying a box of USM Football DVDs that came in, currently the Digi Lab is working on digitizing old footage of USM football. This box of DVDs was yet another group that needed to be digitized. I was enlisted to inventory them, creating an excel spreadsheet with some of the basic information concerning each item within the box.

The other project I worked on was transcribing USM yearbooks. All USM yearbooks are digitized and available online, but sometimes the computer automated transcription of what each page says isn't correct. My job was to go through the 1928 yearbook and check the automated transcriptions. If the automated one was not correct I then had to create one. I used a word document and kept track of each page, if a page didn't need any corrections I simply entered "No changes" for that page.

Throughout all of the assignments I learned to use new programs such as MD5Summer to create checksums for each scanned image from the cookbooks, and FileRenamer to rename multiple files at the same time without having to click or edit each individual file. I learned about different storage and preservation sites/programs like ContentDM versus Preservica. Comparing these two was interesting because I had used ContentDM in a class in the spring. The major difference between the two systems is that Preservica will actually preserve digital materials stored with them, whereas ContentDM really only stores the data. Preservica provides users with services to change the format of digital items/data when formats change, for example when TIFF is no longer the best format for storing data Preservica will aid in updating the file format to whatever is the new best format.