Jack Campin writes: | Perhaps it might make it clearer why I'm being so insistent about | this if I explain what most of my time using ABC is spent doing. | I spend about a full day a week in the National Library of Scotland | researching things, mostly tunes, which are copied in ABC using a | geriatric Mac laptop that runs BarFly and pair of cheap walkman | headphones. | | For the time I'm transcribing tunes, I'm working with rare sources | that I can't afford to have photocopied; the process required by the | library for old and delicate material involves intermediate microfilm, | and usually leads to a fairly bad result anyway, where things like | articulation marks often get lost. (The NLS's charges, which are | among the lowest in Scotland for rare materials, are still high enough | that if I wanted everything I transcribed to be on xerox first, I could | easily incur a photocopy bill for a day's direct transcribing that was | more than I paid for my laptop).
So have you (or they) considered using a digital camera instead? This is rapidly becoming a much more practical approach than microfilm. For an example, look at: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/img/P7070088.JPG I took this photo with a handheld Olympus C-700. It's one of many cameras with a "macro" (;-) feature and can focus as close as about 10 cm. This photo was taken from about 25 cm. The weakness of the staff lines isn't a photo artifact; the original was that bad. In fact, the picture just might be slightly more readable than the original. Anyway, this was taken with the page lying flat in its binder, as you can probably see, and didn't require me or anything else touching the page. Bound pages would be a little bit trickier, since they'd have to be held flat. You'd probably want two people to handle that, if the pages are at all fragile. After taking the photo, I plugged the camera into a Mac Powerbook, iPhoto read it in, and I scp'd it over to my web server. This was a couple minutes' work. I'm not sure how much of this would work on a geriatric Mac, but it certainly works well with a newer Mac laptop. Some years back, I read an interesting SF short story, about Sherlock Holmes' last case. He was contracted by a local "flying saucer nut" to investigate the possibility of visiting aliens. Sherlock thought that if they were really here, and hadn't announced themselves, they were probably scholars studying our planet. So one good place to look for them would be the British Museum. He went there and watched the patrons. He noticed some of them taking photos of a number of books in the collection, without using flash. So he came back later with a light meter, and with a bit of research at camera dealers, determined that there were no cameras available that could take hand-held photos without flash under the museum's low-light conditions. This proved that they were using technology not available on Earth, so they had to be aliens. Case solved. This story might not work now. I did use flash for my photo, but I'm pretty sure there are digital cameras available (for a good price) that wouldn't have needed flash. But this does give you an idea of what a consumer-grade camera costing a few hundred dollars can do now. Just make sure it can do close focus, 20 cm or less. (I wonder if I could find the story. I don't recall who wrote it or what the title was. As the story continues, Sherlock is soon visited by one of the aliens, who learned of him because they were monitoring the saucer-nut organization, and thus learned that he had unmasked them. They wanted to hire him to look for other aliens, because they were having problems with unauthorized visitors to Earth, and needed someone who was good at spotting them ...) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
