Jessamyn got to attend the Internet Archive’s latest presentation relating to the Open Content Alliance. Basically they announced that more organizations, including Microsoft, are on the bandwagon of digitizing expired-copyright books. Jessamyn and others posted photos of the book scanning machine. I was intrigued as it looked like a custom built system.
I’ve sent a bunch of questions about the scanner to Brewster and the archivist-talk yahoo mailing list. However, Jessamyn was able to provide a handful of details.
- It is in fact a custom-built system
- Page turning is done by a human. No robotic arms, vacuums, or puff’s of air to flip the page.
- The glass platen is operated by a foot pedal
- Software deals with metadata like page number and copyright status
Not sure what is used to capture the image. I suspect a high-end digital camera. The fact that a human has to manually turn the pages is a big bummer. It likely makes things slower and more expensive. On the upside, it makes the system much simpler, and probably more reliable.
Above photo by “ioerror“. More photos of the event from Jessamyn here. For samples of scanned books check out the Open Library website.
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Very interested in what your final solutions ended up. Those expensive optional equipment like the those offered by 4digitalbooks.com are crazy. I commend you on trying to find a better solution. Keep me posted of your progress I really what to know!
Comment by Derrick 05.11.06 @ 4:49 pmI am also very interested in your results.
Where could I get more information about your projects?
We are looking at similar solutions here in Germany.
Looking forward to your posts!
I get 1 page per 7 seconds using a Canon Powershot A620 and an iBook. The speed is related to the time the camera needs to a) focus and b) copy the photo to the Mac. I still need to make the glass plate; I tried to work without, but the ’scans’ need to much manual correction in the GIMP afterwards.
1 second is extremely fast! I believe even the Atiz needs two seconds or so.
Comment by Branko Collin 12.24.06 @ 1:46 pmLeave a comment
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I bought the new Sony R1 (10 meg, true digital SLR, US$1200, not imitation Nikon stuff), put it on a stand (planter stand $4US), put lights left and right (20$US), used transparent tape to join two glass plates to hold pages down and flat (3$us), adjusted height to get a balance between final resolution (approx 300 dpi viewing and printing) and size of pages in one shot of the camera, used adobe software everyone has already, and low and behold, I could get AVERAGE over 50 books of 1 page a second into tiff format, with conversion to pdf etc. handled in batch mode. 1 page a second is 3500 pages a hour (compared to 1200 for the US$150,000 top of the market automated thing). Of course my wrists began to hurt like hell after half an hour–in a day I would probably get irreversible arthritis. So I hired two students to take turns doing 10 minute stints, with 10 minutes per hour doing nothing.
Comment by richard greene 01.21.06 @ 10:01 amI have also assigned each student of my research seminar class to design and build a different working version of an automatic page turner device that works with my existing set up. In about 2 months we will see how things turn out. I cannot understand a world so devoid of local ordinary person building that people would buy nothing and copy nothing or else pay US$150,000 for what can be done for under US$1300 by anyone, even brainless ones like me.