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.
