At Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:32:08 -0400, Christine Schwartz wrote: > > We are looking into buying a book scanner which we'll probably use for > archival papers as well--probably something in the $1,000.00 range. > > Any advice?
Most organizations, or at least the big ones, Internet Archive and Google, seem to be using a design based on 2 fixed cameras rather than a tradition scanner type device. Is this what you had in mind? Unfortunately none of these products are cheap. Internet Archive’s Scribe machine cost upwards (3 years ago) of $15k, [1] mostly because it has two very expensive cameras. Google’s data is unavailable. A company called Kirtas also sells what look like very expensive machines of a similar design. On the other hand, there are projects like bkrpr [2] and [3], home-brew scanning stations build for marginally more than the cost of a pair of $100 cameras. I think that these are a real possibility for smaller organizations. The maturity of the software and workflow is problematic, but with Google’s Ocropus OCR software [4] freely available as the heart of a scanning workflow, the possibility is there. Both bkrpr and [3] have software currently available, although in the case of bkrpr at least the software is in the very early stages of development. best, Erik Hetzner 1. <http://redjar.org/jared/blog/archives/2006/02/10/more-details-on-open-archives-scribe-book-scanner-project/> 2. <http://bkrpr.org/doku.php> 3. <http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/> 4. <http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/>
;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library ;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3
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