On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Andrew Turveyandrewrturvey@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.