Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Built a scanner? Started to build a scanner? Record your progress here. Doesn't need to be a whole scanner - triggers and other parts are fine. Commercial scanners are fine too.

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daniel_reetz
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Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by daniel_reetz »

Have a look at this fantastic and complete thesis project, including this tremendous scanner design:
GeorgsonDIYBookScanner.jpg
GeorgsonDIYBookScanner.jpg (147.21 KiB) Viewed 8633 times
http://www.wls.wels.net/sites/default/f ... orgson.pdf

Seth, if you're a member here, say hi! And if you're not, please join up. I'd love to chat with you about your machine!
sethg
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Re: Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by sethg »

Wow, I have to say I'm honored to be called out here.

I did a little posting when I was working on this about two years ago. I had originally intended to do a big write-up on it and what I learned from the project here. However, I finished it close to the end of the school year and was busy with graduation and then moving with my wife out to South Dakota, where I'm now a pastor in Mobridge. I just never got back to do that summary post.

The whole project actually started before I had to come up with something for a thesis. I have always loved books, especially old books. I have also always loved building things. And so I happened across diybookscanner.org a number of years ago and became an avid forum reader. Meanwhile I was studying to become a pastor, and so I had some great access to libraries and rare books collections. I'm a member of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which has strong ties to history, going back to Martin Luther in the 1500's, and Martin Luther really only rediscovered the teachings of the Bible that had been obscured by the Roman Catholic church of his day, as even modern Roman Catholic scholars admit. Our WELS college and seminary both have rare books collections with some items that were printed before Gutenberg's movable type. I've been told that some of these books are valued at over $20,000. Of course, that means these books are kept under lock and key and are not easily accessed. Also, our schools are not wealthy universities and their book preservation methods are less than ideal. I think the seminary rare books room has two residential dehumidifiers and a couple floor fans for climate control.

So when I needed to come up with a topic for a thesis, I wanted to tackle what I saw as a practical problem (and let me get my hands dirty)-- the long term storage and public dissemination of the rare books library at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. For that I would build a book scanner. The problem I quickly ran into was that many of those old books are enormous. They are often well over 1000 pages in length, and printed on large folio-size paper. And as the books scale up, the scanner has to scale up proportionately. So that's where my crazy book scanner journey began.

I'll be back with pictures and insights that I can remember from the project. More importantly though, thank you, the community here at diybookscanner.org, for all your ideas that made it possible for me to do something like this.

-Seth Georgson
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by daniel_reetz »

Thanks again, for your thesis (also your previous posts here) and the rest of it. I know writing up a giant post about everything you encountered can be pretty tough/daunting (esp after canning it up in a thesis like that). If I could pick one thing (beyond seeing all those awesome books) I'd be interested in more details about/experiences with your scissor-lift platen and how it all worked out. It's something I've considered time and again but never built.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by daniel_reetz »

(also noting that SethG shared a model of his design here - again, exemplary: http://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtop ... 201#p11527 )
sethg
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Re: Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by sethg »

The scissor-lift design was something I used to make sure a book is raised evenly against the fixed platen. I felt that this would be the best way to ensure consistent scans. I haven't used a lot of different designs so it is hard for me to compare the results, but overall I am happy with the level of control I achieved.

One problem that I had was weight. The whole thing got quite heavy. You can see in the picture the counterweights I added. Each side has two large chunks of metal pipe, one inside the other, with a bolt running through the whole thing. This worked nicely, and with a short chain and clip hanging down from each side I could add or subtract weight to balance it until the book and cradle weight was zeroed out. I was very happy with this but for two complaints. The first is that as you add joints more precision is necessary. This isn't a bad thing, but I was using cheap 2x4s with all kinds of warp in them. If I were to do it again, I would probably use metal for the cradle and scissor-lift parts. Aluminum would probably be great, partly also for the other complaint, which was that even with the weight zeroed out, the mass was still considerable and the book needs to change direction rapidly as a person performs the scanning. So running it is still a pretty good workout. On top of that, I worried a little that a person could accidentally drive a book straight through the platen.

I'm attaching a zip of the final blender files I had, which are pretty accurate to the final product. It appears that they won't work in the newest version of Blender, but older versions of Blender can be downloaded from their site. I don't remember which version I used, but 2.62 works for them.
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GeorgsonScanner.zip
Blender 2.62 files
(1.05 MiB) Downloaded 497 times
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scann
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Re: Seth Georgson Seminary Book Scanner

Post by scann »

whoa. look at the size of that thing!

this is incredible, and it would be really cool to see how it works -do you have a video or something that you can post for us to see it working?
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