[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

[Lars Aronsson]

John at Darkstar wrote:

> I wish someone would support Project Runeberg or Project 
> Gutenberg so they could scan them and make them _free_...

Where are the newspapers now?  How large (physically) is the 
collection?  Can you (Wikimedia Norway) find funding for storing 
them for a few years?  That could give you time to think of what 
to do.  After this, you can either scan them, store them longer, 
or give up and throw them away.

You need to do the math.  Things like square metres and months of 
rent should be easy to calculate.  Is the sum reasonable?  If you 
can find the money, would this be the best use for it?  
(Apparently, the library doesn't think so.)

Are the same newspapers available on microfilm, and which costs 
less: To buy a copy of the microfilm or to store the newspapers? 
Scanning the microfilm will require less man-hours and therefore 
be cheaper.  It will still be a large project.

I have scanned some old books with sheet-feeding scanners, by 
cutting off the spine.  These are books that I got for free or 
bought cheap, such as "The New Students' Reference Work" in 
Wikisource. The drawback is that I need to store the books. For 
this, I rent a small storage room of 14 square metres (13x11 ft), 
which is almost full. This is the tiny, hobbyist scale of Project 
Runeberg.  It's a bit bigger than Wikisource, but much smaller 
than any real library.

For a larger digitization project, acquiring and storing books (or 
newspapers) is a real burden.  It's a lot smarter to scan 
collections at libraries that you don't have to store.  This is 
what Google does, and what the Internet Archive does.

All digitization projects today use digital cameras instead of 
scanners.  Cameras have recently grown from 5 to 10 megapixels, 
making them useful for larger and larger books.  Newspapers have 
huge pages and should best be captured with a 50 or 100 megapixel 
camera.  These are not affordable today, but might be in 5 or 10 
years time.  It might be wise to scan small books now and wait 
with newspapers for later.  This is exactly what Google has done.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/