Scanning & conversion

Bulk work on ordinary printing

Special efforts on manuscripts

Conversion of art works

Non-visual material

Modern printing

Sheet-fed vs. flatbed vs. look-down vs. digital cameras

A. Sheet-fed is fast, but requires unbinding the book.

B. Flatbed is slow, may break binding, but the scanner is really cheap.

C. Look-down scanners rare: Minolta PS3000. Expensive, good quality, so far no color.

D. Digital cameras on copystands: cheap, good quality, some assembly required

Too much of the money goes to quality control.

Cost of scanning

You can get about 200-300 hand-driven exposures per hour on a Minolta PS3000.

Sheet fed systems can do 5-6 books an hour if they don’t jam.

Microfilm scanners can do 2 pages/second (and the pages can’t get out of order.

Typical numbers are 10 cents/page up to 25 cents/page.

Can you do OCR?

London paper, 1728. Rotten letters.

Comparison of resolutions

600, 150, and 100 dpi. (Original in small print).

Value of grey scale

Grey scale adds legibility (antialiases).

Recently reannounced with great commercial hype.

OCR again

Humphrey accused.@of making more feathers fly

BARELY a fortnight after being cleared by John Major of kflling four robin chicks that were nesting in a windowboxoutside the Cabinet room, Humphrey the ...

Resolution

Michael Ester’s work: 1000x1000 good enough

Special Materials

Electronic Beowulf (www.uky.edu/~kiernan)

Undoing erasures

Importance of color imaging on black ink

Special illumination

Here: backlight; also low-incidence, UV, IR.

ConclusionsText scanning is now a commodity. So is slide scanning for art. Sound conversion is easy but not standard, nor is video. The entertainment industry is driving the technology; libraries tag along.

What you have to choose is the balance between cost and result. Perfection is impossible and near-perfection can be too costly; a sloppy job might not get used at all. But remember Voltaire:

“The best is the enemy of the good”.