I’ve been asked by a small-sized museum / special library to make a suggestion on what kind of equipment a start-up digitization studio would need while operating under a budget of approximately $3,200. This studio would need the cabability of digitizing photos, and possibly some text, post-processing the scans, hosting the images on an existing web server, and then preserving the master scans. It’s an interesting project, and one that can easily be accomplished within a tight budget. By putting the recommendation online, I’m hoping that others will find this and make further recommendations on the following:

Here are the criteria for the digitization studio:

1. Budget of $3,200
2. Manageable by a staff of basically one, with minimal to no technical support
3. Capable of digitizing photos & text according the best practices per the BCR Digital Imaging document
4. Capable of long-term preservation of master files
5. Capable of public access to the resulting web-ready scans

Here are some recommendations using the lowest prices (found via Google Product Search) as of this writing:

Scanning

Computer-Baseline: $600

What’s amazing to me is that a baseline studio-ready PC can be had for as little as $600, maybe less. While it’s easy to spend more, as long as it has a minimum of 2GB memory and 100GB+ hard drive you’re good to go. Upgrade options here include a larger monitor and more memory. Macs will be more expensive, but can be a good solution.

Scanner-Baseline: $735

PlusTek OpticBook 4600: I’ve used the OpticBook 3600 previously and was very happy with it. It offers a scanning area that is good enough for 8 1/2″ x 11″ photos while also being configured to drape books over the side in a way that won’t break the binding and still allows you to get deep into the gutter of the page.

Upgrade option – Epson 10000XL Photo: $2,500. This scanner has excellent dynamic range, which for photos is paramount but comes at a price. Other options include a digital camera, but if you go in this direction you’ll need to worry about lighting and dealing with RAW files. For a start-up studio that may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Post-Processing and Quality Control

Image-processing baseline: $176

Photoshop CS3 is probably your best option. The latest version is CS4, but for a start-up studio the earlier version is going to work fine. This software will be used to run the scanner for capturing master images and to create derivative files that are web-ready. Price: $150

Alternately, the open-source software Gimp is an excellent solution. It will do almost everything that Photoshop can do. The only downside is if your just learning image manipulation, most of the tutorials available are for Photoshop. Price: Free

Tutorials: Ben Willmore’s Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques is an invaluable resource. It will walk you through everything you need to know to make web-ready derivatives: straightening, cropping, adjusting levels, sharpening, resizing, etc. Price: $26

File Name Editing: Bulk Rename Utility is a good resource for renaming an entire directory-worth of files. This is an invaluable resource and free.

Image Quality Control: I find IrfanView to be an excellent, light-weight, and fast image viewer. This is crucial if you need to browse through a couple thousand images quickly and easily. It also has the capability to do some simple image editing, like cropping. Price: Free

Optical Character Recognition: OCR will give you the capability to convert images of text to actual text. This will allow you to create PDFs as well as text files of the scans. Most scanners come with the Sprint version of Abbyy FineReader, which is fine for starting out. Upgrade to the Pro version is a good idea when the studio expands its capabilities. Price: Free ($179 for an upgrade to Pro)

Public Image Presentation

Hosting Baseline: Free (as in “free puppy”)

Greenstone is open-source hosting software designed with the small institution in mind. As long as you have a web server to place files on, you’re good to go. Alternately, you can go with CONTENTdm, which has either a hosted option or a version that you host yourself. Fees for this can be quite steep, so moving to this later may be an option. One caveat: if technical support is not available to you, getting content you’ve placed on Greenstone into CONTENTdm is not trivial. Plan on rebuilding your collections from scratch with any migration. Price: Free

Long-Term Preservation

Preservation Baseline: $749

This is about ensuring that the master files created in a digitization studio can be kept indefinitely, at least on a bit bit level. Migration, emulation, etc. is another issue entirely. (Most istitutions are taking the attitude that we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.) For a small institution without a network, what’s needed is redundant storage that’s easy to maintain. Data Robotics has an elegant solution in its Drobo product. It accepts cheap and easily purchased hard drives which it monitors for you to guard against bit rot (which is inevitable, eventually). If a drive goes bad, you simply replace it and Drobo manages the reformatting and transfer for you. With this setup two copies would be kept: one on the scanning computer, and one on the Drobo. If it’s also possible to keep another copy on a network, that would help spread the risk.

Grand Total: $2,260

That’s about $1,000 below budget, which will give you room to maneuver. Upgrading from here I’d recommend getting as large a monitor as possible, upgrading the ram of the computer to 4GB, and possibly finding a scanner somewhere between the OpticBook and the Epson.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

• James Robertson writes about Practical Ways to Assess CMS Usability including the following:

1. Vendor demo
2. Involve end-users
3. End-user training
4. Demo sites
5. Reference sites
6. Proof of concept
7. Usability testing

• Gizmoto review of Sony’s PRS-700 ebook reader:

Unfortunately, the “improvements” have taken away the very essence of the Reader—the easy-on-the-eyes screen. … Seriously, this thing has a fatal design flaw. The translucent layer that adds both the touchscreen and sidelight functions picks up so much ambient light from every angle, it’s impossible to read with even the most lowly of night-stand lamps turned on.

• The Electronic Library journal has an article called Usability Study of Digital Institutional Repositories which I don’t have access to yet. I’m still waiting for this one to arrive.
• The WordPress blog reports the Results of Project Icon which placed several icon designs up to a vote by the community.                                          ==>
• The companion website to the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces is working on a Social Pattern Library that shows promise. Included are links to other pattern libraries.

CopyBlogger has an interesting write-up on social proof. A lengthy quote:

So, social proof gives us important cues about how to behave in ambiguous social situations. But what’s ambiguous about social media?

First of all, we’re not sure if we should pay attention. Given the vast amount of information we’re exposed to daily, we naturally look for quick cues about the quality of what we come across. And we’re wired to look to others for those indications of quality.

Secondly, we look for cues as to whether or not to accept the message itself. If you’re reading something in your area of expertise, you’re less likely to look for external indicators. But if the topic or position is new to you or novel in any way, you’ll likely be influenced by the raw popularity of the piece, plus the specific comments of others who’ve come before.

But there’s also a negative side to the effect. If no one really knows what’s going on, and everyone is basing thier judgements on everyone else, then bad things can happen. Here’s a quote from Erin Prophet, daughter of Elizabeth Claire Prophet from the Church Universal and Triumphant, on what happened in the early 90′s when a prophesied end of the world didn’t occur:

In the book’s preface, Prophet writes that one reason she penned the account is to expose the flawed thinking that led to her mother’s “apocalyptic prophecies” and the shelters built in their wake.

“Since then I have spent many sleepless nights asking myself why and how it happened and whether there was anything I could have done to change the outcome,” she writes. “It was a mistake, a Napoleon-invading-Russia sort of blunder, which arose from a collection of ideas that obscured and tarnished my mother’s life work.”

She sees CUT’s story “as a cautionary tale of what happens when such ideas are taken to an extreme.”

As powerful as social proof is, there is a potential downside. The potential this downside has on the social internet, I have no idea.

• Michael Magoolaghan writes about working with library design as an information architect. He includes a very interesting chart that maps out patron behavior:
  

  Redesigning the User Experience

• Six Revisions has an excellent post of links to 20 sites for mastering web design
• Wayne College Library addresses quiet study in their library weblog
• Edward Lee from Ohio State has an article called Warming Up to User-Generated Content from a copyright point of view
  

• iPhone users frustrated with mobile news website design
• The UKSG completed a 3-year study finding that link resolvers are driving article use among academic library patrons [doc]
• Southwester College student newspaper reports that single students hogging study rooms is impolite
• Michael Lascarides, the new usability analyst at NYPL, writes about the work of Willliam “Holly” Whyte and the goals of usability
• Yale Library’s Usability and Assessment department starts a new blog
• College of DuPage library responds to user complaints of study room use
• The science library at Wesleyan gets a new student lounge which was designed by students
• Letter to the editor complaining about noise in the University of New Mexico library
• Steve Toub and Martha Whitehead talk about User Generated Content and Social Discovery at Access 2008 [slides]

… and by “fail-safe” I mean safe to fail with minimal consequences. That’s the question I’m wondering about after viewing this Cory Doctorow lecture a couple of weeks ago:

The transcript can be found here: http://craphound.com/cambridge_biz_lectures.txt

A few key quotes:

The Internet turns out to be much better at allowing people to form groups than it is at allowing people to copy. … The dream of universal access to all human knowledge – the notion that we can take pieces of information, stick them on the Internet and that they can pervade every corner of the world, almost instantaneously.
…
This is a pretty amazing thing, and it’s understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human knowledge is nuking collaboration costs – getting rid of the cost of getting people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.
…
And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn’t do it, and if you did do it, you certainly couldn’t do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form of success before you’d venture to do anything.
…
Most of the things that we now think of today as very successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come into existence; from the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel – every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion, certainly never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

This ability to fail with little consequence makes me wonder if self-publishing will take off pretty soon. I was messing around over the weekend with feedbooks.com while investigating the epub format. I was surprised to come across Doctorow’s short story “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” on this site. Since he’s made the story open source it is now spreading out across the web and accumulating its own communities. This makes me wonder what value publishing houses are even offering anymore. Walking through Barnes & Noble this weekend I was struck by how dead it feels. The Science Fiction section is slowly being taken over by fan fiction (star wars and Forgotten Realms, etc.) and it was really difficult to get excited about anything.

When you combine the new ebook formats (epub, mobi, kindle, etc.), the increasing number of platforms available for access (like the Kindle, Sony PRS505, blackberry, palm pilot, and iPhone/iPod Touch) with the inherent viral qualities of the Internet I’m wondering what downsides there are to self publishing? Plus, reading Doctorow’s short story on a laptop using Adobe’s Digital Editions was actually a fairly pleasant experience.

If the cost of publishing continues its trajectory towards zero, the potential for, and ease of, creating reader communities continues to increase, AND the social-proof value of publishing house sponsorship diminishes, then it’s quite possible that self-published fiction will really take off.

**UPDATE**

This isn’t really fiction, but I think furthers the question: 20 free ebooks about social media

]]> http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/08/18/is-self-published-fiction-becoming-fail-safe/feed/ 2 http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2007/03/08/on-the-renascence-of-the-writer/ http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2007/03/08/on-the-renascence-of-the-writer/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:07:36 +0000 Steve McCann http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2007/03/08/on-the-renascence-of-the-writer/ Walt Crawford has an interesting article in the latest edition of Econtent:   Crawford, W. (2007). The Renascence of the Writer. Econtent, 30(2), 44. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from [Ebscohost] or [WorldCat]. One thesis that I’m working on here is that there is a nascent category of blogging which I’m thinking of as “academic blogging” [...]]]>

Walt Crawford has an interesting article in the latest edition of Econtent:

Crawford, W. (2007). The Renascence of the Writer. Econtent, 30(2), 44. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from [Ebscohost] or [WorldCat].

One thesis that I’m working on here is that there is a nascent category of blogging which I’m thinking of as “academic blogging” which can be used by any academic (or anyone for that matter) to advance their careers simply through the act of reading and commentary. Here’s Crawford:

Blogs offer a safe way to get started. There are no expectations,
no grading, no rejection letters. Initially, there may not even be
any readers. You can start with a pseudonym and add your real
name on an About page later, when and if readers appreciate
what you’re doing. You can start with a paragraph on something
of momentary interest, build to a short short story (usually but
not always nonfiction) on something that interests you more—
and possibly progress to a series of linked posts that, taken as
a whole, constitute an essay or story well worth preserving
and expanding.

I agree with that. The barrier to entry for blogging is essentially nil (aside from the costs of time and effort.) But Crawford also brings up an interesting signal-to-noise model that I hadn’t heard of: Sturgeon’s Law where 90% of everything is crud. Interestingly though, he’s using this in a 90:9:1 formulation where 90% is crud, 9% is interesting, and 1% will continue to be published long-term. That sounds about right. But for those of us in academia, I think it’s possible to be a member of both the 90% and 1% clubs at the same time. Just because it’s crud, doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing it.