On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Andrew
Turvey<andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
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?
For digitizing what?
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.
Turn the page, click a button... It avoids the stress on the books
that a flatbed scanner would add and is faster to boot.
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.