Scan quality is excellent.
Yes, is a very promising way - my suggestion is, to get always scans in TIFF (if possible; they are large but USB are large too ...), tro transform them into an image-only pdf (which is the simpler tool to do this?) and to load a copy into Internet Archive specifyng both the library where the book has been scanned AND the wikisource contribution in scansion/merging TIFFs/uploading into IA.
Then the excellent OCR -> divu produced by IA can be downloaded and uploaded into Commons. A good way to share anything, IMHO.
In the meantime: IA produces too an extremely interesting ABBYY.gz output; it's a xml where a incredible set of interesting data is recorded for any scanned character. Here an example for a random character of a random IA book:
<charParams l="1356" t="680" r="1544" b="884" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="25" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="347">G</charParams>
Something to explore deeply IMHO; I presume that less than 1% of usable ABBYY scan data are wrapped into djvu as OCR layer.
Alex
2013/6/13 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
Some research libraries in Stockholm (at archives and museums) have put up book scanners that the public can use. They have the same function as a public copier, but you get your copies on a USB stick rather than on paper.
This opens an interesting opportunity for Wikisource and similar volunteer book scanning projects. Instead of buying expensive equipment, experimenting with cameras and lighting, or building your own scanner, you can just visit such a library. I guess you can even bring your own book and scan it there, instead of just using the library's books. (Of course you still need to consider copyright. That goes without saying.)
Wikimedia Sverige, the Swedish chapter of the WMF, started a wiki page to document some experience from this kind of use, in Swedish of course, https://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/**Allm%C3%A4nhetens_bokscannerhttps://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Allm%C3%A4nhetens_bokscanner
Here is an example of a book that was scanned this way, http://runeberg.org/**nordmuseet/1897/0001.htmlhttp://runeberg.org/nordmuseet/1897/0001.html (Ironically, it is the annual report for 1897 of the museum where it was scanned. They have the scanner standing in their own library, but they have not scanned their own reports.)
Are you familiar with anyting similar? Any other pages that we should link to?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
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