Digitizing scientific archives

[mathew.l...@gmail.com]

Firstly, thank you Richard for starting this group!

I want to know if anyone has experience digitizing archives with
nothing more than digital cameras, good lighting and some OCR
software. My digicam is my best friend in the library, way better
than a photocopier.

Molly and I (as well as many other people) have dreamt of accessing
the New Alchemists archive. They were scientists at Woods Hole who
also ran a farm in the 1970's and 80's creating experimental
agriculture setups.

while their books are inspiring, the hard data is hard to come by, and
the journals they published not readily accessible.

Here is what they've got:
http://www.nature.my.cape.com/greencenter/newalchemy.html

So Molly and I are thinking of going to Cape Cod this summer and
digitizing some of their archive, which they have been quite slow at
doing themselves. We don't have funding and the whole grant-writing
process to set them up with book scanners would take about as much
time as we want to dedicate to the project.

thoughts?

[Pharos]

What a cool project to start this discussion with!

I don't have a lot of practical experience in DIY book digitization
(though it's been something I've been hoping to get into for awhile
now), but I've poked around a little and found a couple of things that
may be helpful to smaller projects using only a digital camera.

This is a freeware OCR program that claims to be optimized for digital
cameras (haven't used it myself yet):

http://www.topocr.com/

Here is some neat advice from Project Runeberg, the Scandinavian
counterpart to Project Gutenberg (it's a couple of years old, but
still looks quite useful):

http://runeberg.org/admin/camera.html

And here is a commercial site that also has some tips:

http://finereader.abbyy.com/about_OCR

Thanks,
Richard
Wikimedia NYC

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