[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

Sat Sep 23 18:27:35 UTC 2006

On 9/23/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> Here's an idea. I presume the main problem with scanning them is their
> size (ie they won't fit on an ordinary scanner). Why not just scan them
> in sections and then use 'photo stitching' software (the kind that's
> designed to turn a collection of photos into a panorama) to turn the
> scanned sections into a single image?

It's time consuming and difficult. It is very easy to screw up in
scanning something like this, so all of the parts will fit except for
one (i.e. if something is not scanned at exactly the same elevation or
gets skewed slightly in some other way).

It can be done. It's just not very easy. And it's certainly not fun. I
wouldn't do it for free.

In the end I suspect that most digitization of such things will be
done either by countries which will try to sell access to them (i.e.
ProQuest) or as not-for-profit grants (i.e. a university deciding to
put its PD library online, which looks good on a yearly report even if
it doesn't create any revenue). This sort of dull work is not the sort
of thing that too many volunteers would be interested in doing over
time, IMO. (Maybe I'm wrong! Hopefully!)

FF