The Digital Dungeon

Today I got the scanner working and taking pictures in 30 minutes today. I aligned the cameras, set the time delay, and started scanning. I cannot express how impressed I am with this set up. I admit I was not expecting the machine to take pictures based on a time delay, so that you could just turn the pages and let the machine go. This little feature which exploits the time delay of the cameras, increases output to 700+ pages an hour easy. The cradle adjusts back and forth due to pressure and nothing else. It slides, and whichever side of the book is thickest, it moves in that direction. This means that you don’t have to constantly keep readjusting the cradle as a thick book moves through its pages. It also means that you can scan a book with a spine that is over 4 inches (which is a limit for the Kirtas machines). The cameras can be set to autofocus before each shot, which means that you don’t have to stop to fix the focus if it gets off. I also played around with the image...

So, the assembly was quick. Me and two other people got the whole thing set up in an hour and a half. The instructions were a bit vague at times, but the parts fit together in a logical way. One thing that did bother me was that the set up did not come with the AC adapters for the cameras to plug into the wall instead of running on batteries. I contacted the sales rep and she said the AC adapters were extra, and I could have included them in the order- although I never was told that I needed to. At any rate, they end up being $80 a piece and so we’re just going to buy them. The big point is I got the cameras to work today after about 30 minutes of fiddling with things. It turns out the USB extensions that were sent with the equipment have too wide of a plug to fit into the camera properly. However, the cameras came with USB plugs that worked perfectly (although they are a bit shorter than the extensions). So, the assembly was quick. Me and two other people got the whole thing set up in...

Today the new Atiz BookDrive DIY came in, and I can't wait to put it together. It was reletivly cheap, at $10,000 for the whole setup (Cameras, scanner, etc. but not a computer). Of course, we only got the normal book size and not the newspaper size, but we were working under a budget. Atiz posts their manual on-line, so if you want to see what I'll be doing tomorrow to get this thing set up you can see it at http://www.atiz.com/Download/bookdrive_diy_manual.pdf . Once we get this thing in a production environment, I'll post a review of the equipment.

Today I attended a webinar from Sun Microsystems about the new Ex Libris Digital Preservation system. You can view the webinar here . The talking points are they handle all the hardware and they can handle the software. They claim it’s secure and built with redundancy. The major problem is that they say you can’t provide access to the files without getting Primo (Ex Libris’s new Amazon-like catalog toy-which is looking fun). They won’t convert the files for you when the formats out of style, but they make it so that you can maintain and upgrade the files. All and all, I like the idea of a comprehensive digital preservation system being handled by people who know hardware. I Just think it is going to be too expensive for most libraries. Time will tell how many libraries pick this up.

Project planning and project management can be useful for many things besides digital projects, however they are particularly useful for digital projects because digital projects tend to have many different components. You have to worry about people, funding, schedules, and technology. Any one of those things by themselves would be difficult to manage without a plan of attack. Dealing with all of them at once requires a lot of attention and planning. Project planning and project management can be summed up in 5 steps. These should be done in order. This is a brief overview of the project process, and by no means does it cover the whole topic. If you are interested in reading more about project management, I highly suggest The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Project Management Course by Helen S. Cooke and Karen Tate (ISBN 0-07-143897-1). 1) Context Once you have been assigned a digital project, develop your context. Why is the project important? Who wants it done? Who is involved and why? ...

Libraries have to take many things into consideration when considering starting a new digitization project. Equipment for mass digitization is usually specialized and very expensive. Only a few companies make the equipment, allowing them a strong control over the overall market. This causes prices to be inflated. For book scanners a library could pay anywhere from $40,000 to $300,000 for just one piece of equipment. Some book scanners cut the book out of the binding before scanning the pages individually. Keeping an expensive piece of equipment working past the purchase date usually means the library also has to pay a yearly maintenance or warrantee subscription, which adds to the overall price of the equipment. A good guess is 10-15% of the purchase price every year to keep the equipment running. For a $300,000 machine that comes to $30,000-$45,000 a year for as long as the machine is being used. In addition to the price of the equipment, the library must pay for server storage...

The Basics: Large scale Digital Project Management Part 1 I went through a class last year about digital project management, and as much as I was impressed at the technical part of the class, and the part of the class where we designed a website to put the digital stuff up, I was surprised to find out that the class had very little to do with large scale project (items that were over 100 items). It also completely ignored book digitization. This is odd, because 90% of my job is large scale digitization book efforts. There are a few things that you need to consider when doing a large scale digitization effort (especially if it’s books). What is the quantity of items to be digitized? A collection of 200 items is going to be treated differently than a collection of 14,000 items. How much variety is there in the group of items? Are they all books? All pictures? Are they mixed documents? Are they bound? If you find that the group has many subgroups, go ahead and divide them out and make eac...