Kjarrval introduction

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Kjarrval
Posts: 10
Joined: 01 Apr 2023, 18:03
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Iceland

Kjarrval introduction

Post by Kjarrval »

Greetings.

I was here long time ago and built (with my late grandpa) a DIY book scanner using instructions from this forum. Sadly, the account I used on the forum didn't exist anymore so I created this one. If I put in an introduction at the time, it's not here anymore. Anyway, here's a new one:

My name is Svavar Kjarrval from Iceland and have been into book scanning for 9-10 years. I'll be 40 this year, got a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and currently studying for an M.A. in Law.

Been scanning for some time and since my aforementioned book scanner stopped working, I've turned to destructive scanning. The destructive phase started with scanning the Icelandic Supreme Court rulings from its foundation in 1920, of which the court only has decisions from 1999 and later available on its website. At the time, the older decisions were only available via the printed version and scanned versions a private company rented access to... until I scanned it and put it online myself (With only a few missing).

This scanning effort was later expanded to other areas where I scanned in the printed collection of the Icelandic Code (a collection of all Icelandic laws in effect, as amended). Those collections have been available electronically since the 1995 version but the older versions are usually difficult to access. Currently, it's incomplete.

Earlier this year I finished scanning in the collection of Labour Court decisions from 1939-2000 and published them. They stopped publishing them in books when they moved to publishing on the Internet, and didn't bother digitizing the older decisions. Those books were difficult to come by but I managed to get the rest by asking one of the big labour unions.

My current highlighted project is my largest one by far and it entails scanning the Official Journal of Iceland (Stjórnartíðindi) in which laws and related ads have been published in Iceland since 1874. The ads had been published on the Internet since 2001 but, like in the other cases, no proper effort to digitize the older stuff, including by private companies. I've been lucky enough that the Ministry of Justice has supported the work by providing copies of the journal, otherwise I probably wouldn't be able to scan the oldest stuff. What I've completed can be accessed here.

After that, I'll probably go into scanning other old books and putting them online, of which I've bought some of them on second hand stores for cheap. For that I'm gonna need to get my non-destructive book scanner operational.
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daniel_reetz
Posts: 2812
Joined: 03 Jun 2009, 13:56
E-book readers owned: Used to have a PRS-500
Number of books owned: 600
Country: United States
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Re: Kjarrval introduction

Post by daniel_reetz »

Thanks for the intro and congrats on your impressive work, Kjarrval.
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