"On the other hand, there are projects like bkrpr [2] and [3],
home-brew scanning stations build for marginally more than the cost of
a pair of $100 cameras."

Cameras around $100 dollars are very low quality. You could get no where
near the dpi recommended for materials that need to be OCRed. The quality of
images from cameras would be not only low, but the OCR (even with the best
software) would probably have many errors. For someone scanning items at
home this might be ok, but for archival quality, I would not recommend
cameras. If you are grant funded and the grant provider requires a certain
level of quality, you need to make sure the scanning mechanism you use can
scan at that quality.



On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Erik Hetzner <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> At Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:32:08 -0400,
> Christine Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > We are looking into buying a book scanner which we'll probably use for
> > archival papers as well--probably something in the $1,000.00 range.
> >
> > Any advice?
>
> Most organizations, or at least the big ones, Internet Archive and
> Google, seem to be using a design based on 2 fixed cameras rather than
> a tradition scanner type device. Is this what you had in mind?
>
> Unfortunately none of these products are cheap. Internet Archive’s
> Scribe machine cost upwards (3 years ago) of $15k, [1] mostly because
> it has two very expensive cameras. Google’s data is unavailable. A
> company called Kirtas also sells what look like very expensive
> machines of a similar design.
>
> On the other hand, there are projects like bkrpr [2] and [3],
> home-brew scanning stations build for marginally more than the cost of
> a pair of $100 cameras. I think that these are a real possibility for
> smaller organizations. The maturity of the software and workflow is
> problematic, but with Google’s Ocropus OCR software [4] freely
> available as the heart of a scanning workflow, the possibility is
> there. Both bkrpr and [3] have software currently available, although
> in the case of bkrpr at least the software is in the very early stages
> of development.
>
> best,
> Erik Hetzner
>
> 1. <
> http://redjar.org/jared/blog/archives/2006/02/10/more-details-on-open-archives-scribe-book-scanner-project/
> >
> 2. <http://bkrpr.org/doku.php>
> 3. <
> http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/
> >
> 4. <http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/>
>
> ;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
> ;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3
>
>