DIY Book Scanner News

The DIY Book Scanner community now has more than 300 members, and many of these members have built their own scanners. What motivates them? Put mildly, it might seem like a hard sell. After all, why digitize anything when so many big players are so far along? Why risk digitizing anything in the face of absurdly high statutory damages and unintelligible, ever-shifting copyright law? The answers to this question, interesting and illuminating as they are, were not obvious to me when I built my first scanner. But what emerged from the 130,000+ views of my tutorial, above and beyond the media attention, the hundreds of discussions, critiques, and improvements on the original design, was a community of people who needed or wanted this technology badly enough to build it themselves. Their stories, efforts, dreams, and discussions, and what these stories tell us about the future of digital books, is what I’ll be writing about in a series of member profiles.

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Misty De Meo is a Digitization Assistant at the County of Brant Public Library in Paris, Ontario, Canada. Her work is digitizing historical documents, photographs, and other artifacts for preservation and presentation on the web. She joined the DIY Book Scanner community in November of 2009 and has been actively contributing ever since.

Misty’s contributions in the forums are rather interesting, because she is one of a few members using DIY Book Scanning technology in a library setting. The DIY Book Scanner community is founded on “good enough” principles of construction and digitizing – and we’re usually happy to sacrifice a little quality or correctness to get a lot done. In contrast, Misty’s work is guided by standards like the Canadian Council of Archives Red Book, a document she introduced to us, which subsequently informed many of our discussions. However, that hasn’t prevented her from getting a lot done.

Misty recently posted her scanning setup. This is a perfect example of a temporary, expedient scanner from the materials at-hand; it is a means to an end. Instead of waiting for grant money to build or buy a complete scanning solution, Misty assembled this cradle, worked out the proper camera settings and started capturing document images. This kind of initiative defines our community.

At first glance, this scanner may seem a little underwhelming. It’s not the glaring robo-scanner thing on the front page. But what this scanner lacks in dumpster-engineering panache, it makes up for in imaging quality. The whole DIY Book Scanner project and community was made possible by cheap, plentiful digital cameras, and if you know what you’re doing with a camera, it is possible to extract very high quality images from very cheap imagers. Misty applied her archivist training to maximizing the quality of capture from her camera. The results speak for themselves:

(closeup)

What “maximizing the quality” means depends on the physical scanning set up and the goals of the project. Many, many factors contribute to image quality; in fact, “image quality” is both a field of research and a point of confusion. To give you an idea of the kind of investigation Misty (and others) have been doing, check this image.

Originals: 1, 2.

What you are looking at is one page shot on a black background, and one shot on a white background. Here, Misty found the increased off-axis light being reflected into the lens from the white background was causing an overall reduction in image contrast. Our discussion and systematic investigation of these kinds of imaging problems move the DIY book scanner steadily out of the dumpster and into the hands of archivists of all kinds.

Obviously, Misty’s involvement in the DIY Book Scanner community is secondary to her work with the County of Brant Public Library. There, her work centers around two major projects. http://images.ourontario.ca/brant/ started as a collaborative project with a local historical society, who had a collection of materials related to the founder of Paris, Ontario – Hiram Capron, and is presently focused on digitizing materials from Penmans Limited, one of the largest area businesses for most of the 20th century. The digitization and presentation of these collections, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Culture, formed the basis of a larger project about the history of the town in general, and intends to expand to accommodate the histories of surrounding communities as well. The other project is the “Our Brant” wiki, which encourages people with a relationship to the County of Brant to contribute both contemporary and historical information about the County of Brant. In my opinion, this represents the best approach to archival efforts: a solid foundation in the past, buttressed by the firm recognition that the extant population have a lot to offer. One thing the DIY Book Scanning effort anticipates is that eventually, all books and most documents will be scanned and digitally available in some form; up to and after that point, forward looking approaches like this one represent the new role of archivists not as format conversion specialists but as stewards of digital history.

Some highlights from the Digital Collections (selected by Misty):

The full Brant County Illustrated Atlas:
http://images.ourontario.ca/brant/details.asp?ID=69862

A Penmans sweater coats catalogue from 1911:
http://images.ourontario.ca/brant/details.asp?ID=71400

(Selection from the catalog)
http://bit.ly/aPBG9M

An interview with Jackie Remus from the Our Brant project:
http://ourbrant.wikia.com/wiki/Jackie_Remus

The history of the Patton Family:
http://ourbrant.wikia.com/wiki/Patton_family,_owners_of_Kilton_Cottage_cobblestone_house