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Book Scanning at Stanford
The Book & The Computer: Another great article about digitizing books in a library at Stanford. I have to stifle the goosebumps when I read about this stuff.
When you’re turning pages by hand, you can do maybe 150 to 200 pages per hour. It’s slow. But the robot can easily do 600 to 1,200 pages per hour without damaging the books. And it’s rigorously consistent — the page is always flat, the image is always good, and software conversion allows you to index the text so you can search it.
This entry is dedicated to Jenny, who says we all don’t talk about libraries enough. :-)
What This Links To
Book Scanning Made Simple
Book-scanning uncovered: A nice look at a book scanning machine. A technician lays the book onto a special cradle inside the machine and air jets gently fluff up pages on the right side. A robotic arm swings over the book and sucks up one page with a special vacuum, and pulls…
Digitize the World
The Great Library of Amazonia: Here's a fantastic article about multiple efforts to catalog all of humankind's published knowledge, from Amazon's Search Inside the Book to Project Gutenberg to the Internet Archive. This stuff gives me goosebumps. The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've…
Comments
8-)
Thanks, Deane!
I'm in the middle of writing up an essay about how some library services (like databases, the catalog, and live reference) look and work on my Treo 600. After I publish it, maybe some other folks could augment it with comments about how these same services look (and if they even work) on other types of devices. Anyone up for this?
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