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This is an awesome project! Library/archive/historical-preservation people these days, for a while now, generally don't use "scanners" to digitize historical p
by jrochkind1 3y ago
This is an awesome project!
Library/archive/historical-preservation people these days, for a while now, generally don't use "scanners" to digitize historical printed/2D material images, but ordinary high-quality digital cameras, set on tripods, often downward-facing, and manual page-turning.
There is various plans for DIY rigs for such on the internet, for instance here: https://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/.
(although that site seems to be unmaintained with many broken links, it has enough working links you should be able to get the idea. This was a much more popular hobbyist DIY thing a decade+ ago, in the era of dawn of google books etc).
I wonder if there were particular reasons OP went with a "scanner". it seems a lot of the challenge was finding an affordable scanner that could handle the material. Perhaps it ends up being much (much) faster per-page, especially if you are willing to destroy the original, and is so justified? (Even though they ended up having to do manual page feed, possibly still much faster?) Or if they just didn't think of camera-tripod-manually-turned-pages and know it was a (common) option? If it hasn't been considered, it might be worth considering, although the process they have seems to be working well -- the sample output is stunning!
- PAPPPmAc 3y agoThere are a number of commercial substantially sub-$1k prosumer overhead book scanner options now that have nicer work-flows and more automated post processing than the DIY book scanners folks used to hack up (or hand feeding a flatbed) - I think they came out of and subsequently took took a lot of the air out of the DIY efforts. CZUR has been pretty generous with giving book scanning rigs ( https://www.czur.com/product/ETscanner https://www.czur.com/product/ETscanner ) to prominent hobbyists (I think CuriousMarc and Shelby from TechTangents and a couple other retrocomputing type youtube folks got them - apparently it was a good marketing move, that's why I'm aware of them). The two downsides to those rigs here are that it looks like this effort is aiming for 600dpi capture and that would be a ...reach... for the reasonable cost overhead systems, and (Using it as an example because I've looked at theirs) CZUR's machines only go up to about an A3 scan area, while computer shopper was a ridiculous 13x10" format which would be a bit too big to do in the expected 2-up workflow with their units.
- jrochkind1 3y agoNice, thanks for the info. I feel like 600dpi ought to be possible with a DIY setup and a good quality but not break-the-bank camera, but maybe I'm wrong? Where I work, I am not the one who works with the photographic digitization. I know we can do 600 dpi digitization of things of this size (whether we choose to depends on the material). But I suppose our setup may cost substantially more than OP, I'm not sure, I could ask the relevant staff.
- textfiles 3y agoI gave everything a nice long think and I don't need another consultant, thanks.
- jrochkind1 3y agoSorry, I did not mean to be trying to get in OP's business, who I assume you are. I was just curious to learn more about comparison between your choice and non-"scanner" suspended camera type rigs which I don't believe your interesting piece covered, so was interested in working that through with other commenters. It's a great project, thanks!