I love the fact you can achieve such high-quality results with relatively cheap equipment. For many archives i think getting the people to manually scan pages are probably easier to motivate than for us, but chapters and individual Wikimedians could probably be of much help with all the technical aspects, uploading stuff to Commons / Wikisource, getting the word out to other people, etc.
-- Hay On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:10 AM, Lars Aronsson<[email protected]> wrote: > Gregory Maxwell wrote: > >> For digitizing what? > > Exactly, that's the first question. > >> Archive.org digitizes books using a pair of canon 1Ds (? perhaps >> it was a 5D? In any case the 5DII would be sufficient now) on a >> custom stand with a hacked up copy of gphoto2 to actuate the >> cameras. > > That's Brewster Kahle doing things many years ago (2002? 2003?). > Today, a much cheaper low-end digital SLR, or even compact cameras > will give you the needed 10 or so megapixels. But again, if you > need to pay your staff, a ten times more expensive camera might > easily pay its own cost in increased speed, or increased shutter > lifespan. > >> I'm not sure how they're dealing with curvature (I think they >> just may lay a glass plate on the pages), but it would be easy >> enough to solve using a laser pointer with a pattern generating >> holographic grating and a second exposure to capture the page >> distortion and some fairly simple software processing after the >> fact. > > The Internet Archive apparently uses a fixed glass, and lowers the > book cradle to turn pages, http://aipengineering.com/scribe/ > > Other designs have a fixed book cradle and lifts the glass, e.g. > the Atiz DIY, http://diy.atiz.com/ > > I thought the Internet Archive design was very clever, since it > keeps a fixed distance from lens to book surface (beneath the > glass), until I saw the bkrpr.org where you just lift everything. > That's a design for 2009! I haven't tried to build one myself yet. > > ---- > > However, you can capture lots of books (that can be opened fully) > with a single camera, laying the book flat on a table with a glass > on top. That's just like a flatbed scanner (but much faster) > turned upside down. > > In January 2008, I used a 10 megapixel Canon EOS 400D (Digital > Rebel XTi) with a 50 mm lens to shoot this, laying flat on a table > under a glass, http://runeberg.org/stridfin/0226.html > > On that webpage, the image is reduced to 120 dpi (1.2 megapixel), > but the original is 300 dpi (7.5 megapixel). The map shown is > reused in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alavus > > That's an example of how one specialized book can be very useful > for a limited Wikiproject. This book was published in 1909 for the > 100th anniversary of the Finnish War (1808-1809), and digitized in > 2008 for the 200th anniversary. > > > > -- > Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) > Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se > > Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Commons-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l > _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
