This week was, for the most part, the same as usual. I worked with a new Latin American manuscript, I scanned some more broadsides, and worked on a few art prints. The unusual part of this week in digitization comes in the form of technological problems. I was working with a Latin American manuscript on the BookEye (the proprietary name of the overhead scanner) and had just finished scanning all 600+ pages. After scanning, you have to export all images in a selected file type (in this case I was using TIFF) which can take a little while. I selected my file type, hit ‘Export’, and sat back and waited for the export to complete. Everything was going smoothly until an error appeared at the bottom of the export box in bright red. The export had failed just over 2/3rds of the way through the images I had captured (meaning I still had another 150+ images that were lingering in the system, unexported). I thought that it was probably a storage issue, thinking that the files we usually export are typically quite large (TIFFs especially seem to take up quite a lot of space), so I went into the share drive and started deleting old files that I knew had already been uploaded to another storage location. After clearing some storage space I tried the export again, but the progress bar didn’t move! WOE THY NAME IS KATIE! I tried deleting more files, thinking it was still a storage space issue, and then tried again to no avail. By that point the library was closing, so I had to start closing ‘shop’ for the day. The only thing I could think to do was to leave the work up on the software and send my supervisor an email letting them know what had happened. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to export the remaining images, so we had to rescan the last 1/3rd of the book. So, let my misfortune be a lesson to you to always check the amount of available storage space BEFORE scanning 600+ pages of material. Below are some images from the Latin American manuscripts that was the cause of so much frustration this week.
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