You're raising this for discussion _now_, amongst everything else
that's going on?
If I recall correctly, the WMUK board meeting discussion was provoked
by a comment I made earlier in the meeting. My original thought was
that a flat-bed scanner or similar could potentially be very useful
to museums in terms of digitizing old images/documents etc. I would
imagine that a high-quality one of these would cost a few hundred
pounds -- whereas the book scanning machine as described is either
something that likely would cost tens of thousands of pounds, or
would have to be created on a custom basis.
Of course, the real expense with digitization is not the machinery,
but the costs involved with hiring someone to operate it, feed it
material and process the results. The last part is where wikimedia
can be of most use, IMO. It's an open question of how much more of
the process we'd have to be involved in so that the digitization
happens, which would vary depending on the current status of the
digitization efforts at each institution and also the capabilities/
resources available at the institution.
Mike
On 26 Aug 2009, at 23:28, Andrew Turvey wrote:
{ margin: 0; }
We had a discussion at a recent Wikimedia UK board meeting about
potentially buying some digitisation equipment which could be used
to generate content for the Wikimedia projects. This recent email
to the EN-WP list sparked my interest.
Does anyone have any experience with equipment like this, and could
you recommend anything? Any idea what the price range and quality
typically is?
Also, is anyone else in the Wikimedia community currently doing this?
Thanks,
---- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, 23 August, 2009 10:55:32 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain,
Ireland, Portugal
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I believe they have machines to turn pages, and
something to figure
out the distorted photo of the book and render it how it would
look as
a flat page.
Yeah, there are videos of these machines. The book sits open, the
scanner comes down and scans both open pages at once. As it goes up
again, it sucks on one page, causing it to flip over. Then repeat.
Oh, look, here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOQuuLYavY
And while we're at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning
Steve
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