Completing a Scan

Finishing up a scan is described in this short video:

Archivist Quill: Finishing a Book from Jonathon Duerig on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Hi. This is Jonathon Duerig with Tenrec Builders. Now I'm going to talk to you about how to finish up your scans.

We've been scanning. We've got a whole bunch of scans. We've got this whole book all scanned now, at least in theory. And so once we've got our whole book scanned, what you want to do is hit 'done'.

And now, Pi Scan will eject this disk, this SD card you put in here and say 'All disks ejected, ok to power off or disconnect'. And that means it is ok to take this out. So now, we have all of our book on this SD card right here. And we can take this SD card to any computer and copy off the images.

The thing that is on here is just the raw images. So they won't be rotated, they won't be cropped, there won't be anything happening to them. They are images just as they came off the camera. So in order to turn these raw images into an e-book, the very minimum you need to do is (a) you need to rotate them, (b) you need to crop them down to the page and (c) you need to combine them all into one document like a PDF or something.

So that is kind of... And of course there is a lot other things you can do, you can do OCR to figure out the text to make it searchable or make it a small little e-book. You can do color-correction. You can do deskewing, dewarping, there are all kinds of things you can do to try to increase the quality of this or make this information more useful. All of this, both the basics that I outlined and the more advanced stuff is all called post-processing. And there are a number of both free and paid commercial programs to do these tasks which are linked to in the manual.

But, as far as Pi Scan and as far as the Quill is concerned, this is as far as it gets you. The rest is up to the software you install and the process you go through.

Since Pi Scan has already ejected the disks, its ready to go. Now I can turn off Pi Scan. I've got a power strip back here. I'll just turn that off. Turn the lights off.

Here is what you don't want to do, though. I just turned it off and I did that by mistake because if you look, these cameras both have their lenses extended. And, its not like it hurts the camera to have its lens extended, its fine. Except that if it is a long period of time, maybe dust will get in there. So what I like to do is to turn them off manually before turning off the system as a whole.

So now, their lenses are retracted. There's not any chance of dust or anything getting in there, so I should have done that first. Sometimes I forget to do that. I've never had a problem yet, but it makes me happier to do that.

Ok, so now that that's done, I can just turn off everything. So this is still booting up, but I don't care about that because everything is read-only anyways. So now everything is off.

It is often a good idea to re-engage these cradle-stops so nothing moves accidentally.

I often like to take out the counterweight stuff, especially if it is water. These are sealed at the factory, I've never even opened these. But if I leave them on their side forever and if it leaks or something, then that would make me sad. So I just take them out when I'm done. And no more counterweights.

And now this is ready for the next book. And I have the images from my previous book. And that is how you finish things up.