We had a discussion at a recent Wikimedia UK board meeting about potentially buying some digitisation equipment which could be used to generate content for the Wikimedia projects. This recent email to the EN-WP list sparked my interest.

Does anyone have any experience with equipment like this, and could you recommend anything? Any idea what the price range and quality typically is?

Also, is anyone else in the Wikimedia community currently doing this?

Thanks,

---- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp@gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, 23 August, 2009 10:55:32 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 PM, David Gerard<dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe they have machines to turn pages, and something to figure
> out the distorted photo of the book and render it how it would look as
> a flat page.

Yeah, there are videos of these machines. The book sits open, the
scanner comes down and scans both open pages at once. As it goes up
again, it sucks on one page, causing it to flip over. Then repeat.

Oh, look, here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOQuuLYavY

And while we're at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning

Steve

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