book digitizing

[skunath]

I am trying to create a digital archive of some rare latin texts and am trying to figure out the best way to digitize them. Does anyone have any suggestions. How were the textkit books digitized?<br /><br />Pax,<br />--Steve Kunath

[Jeff Tirey]

Hi Steve,<br /><br />I created all the textkit PDF files. All the files you see on the 'learn ancient greek' and 'learn latin' pages are scanned books. The files are really nothing more than multipage images. On the one hand, it creates very large file sizes but on the other, we don't have to worry about OCR, layout and all the other problems with converting a book to digital text.<br /><br />My question for you use do you want your books to be digital text - just like text found in a MS Word document or something similar or do you want your books to be a scanned image of the original book's page.<br /><br />Which route you want to go will have a big impact on the kind of software you need. <br /><br />jeff

[skunath]

I like the PDF idea. <br /><br />What my big question is is what kind of scanner did you use to avoid the gutters of books. I have a flatbed but I keep running into issues with the page gutters.<br /><br />Thanks,<br />--Steve Kunath

[Jeff Tirey]

yeh, the scanner. After my first post, i realized I should have given you information about that too - since no matter what route you take you'll need a scanner.<br /><br />We don't use a flatbed scanner. That would take far too much time. Instead, we use a high speed scanner - its a scanner that has a automatic sheet feeder and it can do nice things like scan both side of the page at once. It also comes with software to handle batch file naming - an important feature. The downside is that they are not cheap. <br /><br />But in order for us to get the material through the scanner we photocopy the book. This has the added benefit of washing the image and making it more bitonal which decreases file size dramatically.<br /><br />As far as removing the gutter, after scanning we use document management software to separate the single scanned page with 2 pages of the book into two separate files. After that step we'll do things like deskew and manually remove book markings and anything else that doesn't look good.<br /><br /><br />jeff<br />