Final Insights From PCC Intern: Mercedes

     As the summer of 2017 comes to a close I am happy to say that I had a fulfilling experience at Cal State LA’s Special Collections and Archives department. I interned over the course of the summer from June to August as part of my completion for the requirements to receive a Digitization Skills Certificate from Pasadena City College. I have a keen interest in digitization because it allows wider access of materials to more individuals and materials that may have limited use due to frailty can be persevered by digitization. I started my summer here excited to put the skills I learned in my classes regarding digitization technology and metadata to practical use and was not disappointed. My objective was to learn the best practices and standards as well as the overall workflow used when archiving materials at Cal State LA.

     While working here I was able to work on digitizing the University Times collection as well as their Thesis collection and began creating metadata for the scanned materials. I started out scanning the University Times in the year 1976 on a Zeutschel OS 12002 scanner which was fun to learn to use because it scanned from overhead. I found it interesting to look at the various articles back from 1976 and see how progressive some opinions stated in the articles were at that time that it was like a mini cultural history lesson. Right after I finished up the year 1976 the Zeutschel scanner glitched and was inoperable to my dismay leading me to think my days of scanning were over only to find out there was another scanner available. This gave me the opportunity to learn to use a different piece of technology. The other scanner was a smaller touch to scan flatbed scanner that I used to digitized the Thesis collection. I really enjoyed creating the metadata for the scanned materials because it gave me the chance to look a little more in depth into the content. Overall I had a very pleasant experience working here with the help of Azalea and Jamie and feel better equipped in my abilities to successfully digitize a collection. 

Insights From PCC Intern: Mercedes

     My name is Mercedes Stanton and I’m interning here at the Special Collections and Archives department at Cal State LA. For the first couple weeks I was scanning issues of the 1976 University Times and found it interesting to see the way things were perceived as they were happening then as opposed to now. I found some interesting stories but nothing that sparked my interest yet to write about until it came to creating the metadata for the June 1976 issues. In the June 2, 1976 issue an article titled “Young democrats oppose prop 15…” caught my interest because the feelings and outlook on the subject has changed so much. In this article it discusses proposition 15 which was a nuclear shutdown initiative for nuclear power plants. Here the students are looking forward to a bright future with nuclear energy believing it is the cleanest source of energy, the safest form of producing energy, and will cut back on the heavy air pollution therefore they protested the proposition with overwhelming success. At the time there were a total of 56 nuclear power plants in the U.S. with an additional 100 plus planning for construction. But shortly after in early March 1979 there was a major disaster at one of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. This is when the outlook on nuclear power plants began to change and people began to realize that they could pose a safety threat. After that the plans for the construction of 100 plus nuclear plants came to a halt. No longer did students protest to keep plants open but instead to shut them down. In total there have been five nuclear power plants in California yet only one remains active today. Overall I just found it very interesting how views have so drastically changed on this matter and have been shaped by events.