Week 14: November 18th and 20th

     Good evening everyone. This week, I got the opportunity to participate in efforts to digitize the VHS tape collection of the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse's library so that they could be easily accessible on the museum's internal server. On Monday I spent the majority of the day setting up a VCR player and a USB adapter that allows the VCR player to be connected to a computer, so that the VHS tapes can then be recorded through video capture soft such as OBS, which is the software we used at the museum. Unfortunately, technology can be finicky sometimes, so much of the first day on Monday was spent getting the VHS adapter to work properly, working out issues with not be able to record video and audio recording over itself. However, once we did get the VHS adapter working, we started to record our first of a number of VHS tapes from the museum library.

    One Wednesday, I returned to the lighthouse and made sure that the VCR player was still working the same as we had left it. Thankfully, everything was in working order and we got to work recording tapes, letting them run from start to finish while being recorded. Then, once a tape was finished, we made sure to backup the video file, save it to the museum's internal server, and then rename the video file so that it can be easily located. While we were letting the VHS tapes record, Holly and I started on another project; Updating the museum's newsletter index. Since the museum opened in 1973, the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse has produced a quarterly newsletter for their patrons to stay updated on goings-on at the museum and other local events. The searchable index for this newsletter, however, is incomplete and so Felipe tasked us with going through each newsletter and adding the missing ones into the index, while also updating the information in older entries. This was a very interesting project for me to tackle since I got to look at some very old newsletters from the museum's past. I think one of the most interesting things I saw in the newsletters was one from 1996 in which the museum advertised the museum's website coming online for the first time.  Ultimately, I had very cool week and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to sort through the museum's newsletters. There were plenty of other interesting finds from throughout the years and I have no doubt that there will be more to find in these last few weeks.

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