Rather than buy some digitization equipment Wikimedia UK might be better off hiring an instructor for a workshop on making one of these scanners. If you can find enough people interested in attending. Then everyone will be scanning things that interest them personally and more likely to see the the projects through.
Birgitte SB
--- On Sat, 8/29/09, teak teak.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
From: teak teak.wiki@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wikisource-l] [Commons-l] Digitisation equipment To: "discussion list for Wikisource, the free library" wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, August 29, 2009, 10:59 AM The community at http://www.diybookscanner.org/ discusses design ideas for DIY book-scanners - lots of in depth instructions and useful tips.
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:10 PM, Lars Aronssonlars@aronsson.se 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 (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
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