Interesting DIY project using simple, consumer-grade cameras and an ingenious box frame to hold them. The project website is at  www.bookliberator.com. According to their blog, they will be using two pieces of free software: scantailor for post-processing and djvubind for OCR, metadata and conversion to the djvu format.

BookLiberator

An example of a final page image:

Decapod is an interesting project with partners from Germany, Canada, and Anarbor, MI and funded through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the site:

The solution will address these problem areas:

1. Allow the camera based capture of bound material by using computer vision techniques to produce flat, clean page images equivalent to those produced from a flat bed scanner.
2. Remove the need for extensive operator intervention in the capture process by detecting scan problems and allowing the operator to rectify the scan immediately.
3. Reduce user intervention in the conversion process by using advanced document understanding techniques to remove almost all intervention, and by reducing the remainder to very simple “1-click” operations.
4. PDF/A outputs will be visually faithful to the original, searchable, and widely usable.
5. Allow the output to be viewable on mobile devices that support PDF reflow.
6. Remove the need for deep software, hardware or digitization skills by integrating all software components into a turnkey end-to-end solution.
7. Remove capital cost barriers by using consumer grade cameras.

Here are the slides from my recent presentation at the 2010 Northwest Archivists conference in April. This tells of the technical and “mindset” decisions we made for our 2009 digitization project at the National Archives. Great experience in Seattle, I’m glad I attended.

Very cool do it yourself project from Instructables.com:

What’s the most efficient method for nearly choking a small digitization shop? Success. That’s something we’re experiencing at The University of Montana and we couldn’t be happier. Over the summer, the library partnered with Dave Beck of Native American Studies on a trip to the National Archives to scan documents from their Central Classified Files centering on the Blackfeet Agency during the period from 1907 – 1935 (Record Group 75.) We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of material that our two (very organized) graduate students were able to come back with: 15,000 images taken in a little under four weeks. We’re in the process now of ingesting the material into our digital collection to make them widely available eventually, but in the meantime I thought I’d share the equipment used on the trip.

Testing the camera setup before sending to DC in 2009.

Equipment List:

• Camera: Canon Rebel XSI
• Lens: Canon EF-S 18-55 IS (both came as a kit)
• Tripod: Manfrotto 055X Pro with a center post that fold out horizontally
• Tripod Head: 484RC2 Mini Ball
• Laptop: Dell 131L (one of our circulating laptops for students)
• Carrying Case: Pelican 1300
• Glass bubble level that is attached to the hot shoe
• Seagate 500GB extermal hard drive
• Total cost: Approximately $1,400

The camera was driven by the laptop which previewed the image being captured. The images were saved to the external hard drive and then FTP’d back to the library on a nightly basis. All images were captured as RAW files, and will be converted before being made live. Here’s an example of the quality of image the students came back with. The master image from which this example was derived is 4,272 x 2,878 pixels, the equivalent of a 240 PPI full color scan.

Example of a natural light capture

Here’s a quick chart that specifies the amount of disk space a single scanned 8.5″ x 11″ master file will take up. Pixels per inch (PPI) and bit levels were taken largely from the BCR best practices document. These estimates were generated with PhotoShop CS4.

The recent discussions about newspapers has got me thinking about the history, and costs, of information. Recently we just digitized a rather large collection of microfilm and are getting it ready to publish it on the library’s website. The below image is a letter to the “Department of Dakota” circa 1869 detailing Native American populations regarded as either “peacable” or “hostile”. Notice the first page of the letter says “copy” at the top. It was someone’s job to simply write out in longhand copies of these letters as they were sent to various officers. I knew this intellectually, but until seeing 28,000+ pages of these types of letters it really hit me how far we’ve come since then. At least from the standpoint of technology. [Full Text of Letter]

Steinhoff, Sascha. Scanning Negatives and Slides: Digitizing your Photographic Archive, 2e. Rocky Nook.  2009. 240p. ISBN 978-1-933952-30-7. pap. $44.95

This book is a valuable addition to the field of digitizing negatives and slides. It covers a wide range of topics, including hardware considerations (from scanners and digital SLR cameras to flatbed and specialized film scanners); readers will also find a nice overview, with workflows, of image capture and editing software. The author goes beyond standard fare such as bit depth and dynamic ranges to explain various types of RAW formats, and includes a useful section on the recovery of images damaged by scratches and dust. Scanning Negatives and Slides is not intended as a stand-alone title for inexperienced readers, or for those without at least some familiarity with digitization issues; it will be most appropriate for photographers, professional archivists, and digital librarians. Recommended for medium to large libraries, museums, and archives with an active digitization program, as well as for special libraries that collect for photographers and/or art galleries.

Steve McCann is the Digital Projects Librarian at The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana.

This review is archived from The Tech Static

This Instructables set by Daniel Reetz is an exciting hack. He lays out a plan for building a two-camera book scanner with V-shaped platen. While the quality is not perfect, the whole concept should be applauded. Read the comments, as well, to see links to similar projects.

I’m archiving this book review, originally found at The Tech Static: