Scanning a Book

Scanning is shown in this short video:

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

Transcript:

Hi. I'm Jonathon Duerig with Tenrec Builders. And we're going to talk about how to actually do capture.

So we've got everything set up from the last video and we're ready to actually start capturing the book.

Let me preface this by saying that you should be capturing in the dark. I've got these flourescent lights and no matter how carefully I've set up the geometry here so that the LEDs don't give you any glare, the flourescent lights are going to give you glare. So if at all possible, you want to be scanning in the dark. If you're not scanning in the dark, you might want to consider making yourself black velvet drapes or something. Stylish and function. But ideally you going to be scanning in the dark.

Of course since I'm doing a video, and you don't want to see me in the dark, doing in this in the dark, I'm not going to do this in the dark here. But you want to do this in the dark. So now you have the lights off theoretically.

Now we're going to start capturing. Here's the way I capture. I prefer capturing standing up. There are some people who like capturing sitting down. But for me it is much better standing up. So what I will do is put one hand here. This is my handlebar hand. This hand goes up and down.

The other hand is the everything else hand. So the handlebar hand goes up and down and the everything else hand turns pages and does capture or whatever I want to do.

First let's say you have what came in the box and you want to do some scanning. So first of all, I like usually to capture the cover in some way. Since these are nylon screws and since this is plastic, it's pretty ok to have this press agains the glass, its not going to scratch the glass. I'm usually a little nervous about that anyways. But, we're going to capture the cover.

I heard the cameras capture. Usually when I hear the cameras capture, that means I can immediately turn the page. And that's how you get a good fast pace. You hear the cameras go, you turn the page. You don't wait for this to say finished. Because if you wait to say finished, it's going to take you four seconds to turn the page, it will take a few seconds for this to say finished. You are going to go half the speed you otherwise would.

I've got that. A blank page, I'll skip the blank page. There's this lovely portrait of the person who wrote the book. A little tissue paper. I don't know. This tissue paper. I'm going to do this. Ok. So now, you've kind of got the idea. You just want to turn the page and capture.

This is how you capture if you just have the things that came in the box. You've got your touch screen you can tap capture on, you've got your handlebar, your hand that can turn the page. Everything's ready to go.

But, moving my hand up and down is kind of annoying. Looking up and down is kind of annoying. So when I really get in the groove, I like to have a keyboard. So the keyboard is of course bring your own keyboard. But its set up so that there are hotkeys that you can press on the keyboard to capture things. If you have the space bar, which is usually what I do, it'll just capture just as if you tapped the capture button.

The trick with the keyboard is that it only detects the keyboard if the keyboard was plugged in right from the start.

Oh no. I just had a little emergency because everything just flipped back and forth on me because I wasn't paying attention. So what I want to do is to show the preview of the last page. You should be showing previews periodically in any case just to be sure that everything is still in focus and nothing is truly borked.

So there's two things. One is that I can see where I was. But I can also see that this page...

So this page is page seve. Oh ok. I was a little bit worried that there was something going wrong opposite page seven. But it actually is a blank page. So the fact that it was just a blank page was actually fine. So everything looks good on this page.

So I'm going to take... I saw that I was on page seven and I'm now on page eight, so I'm going to capture page 8. Because I was a little bit unsure about things I'm going to show the preview again on this one just to make sure that things look good. Whenever you are unsure you want to generate a preview just to make sure. And you can always rescan after looking at a preview.

So everything looks good and everything is in focus on both sides. So that means you can just go to town again. When things look good, you can get into a groove, listen to a book on tape or something and just scan a whole bunch of photograph, or scan a whole bunch of pages.

And you just do this, I dunno, four hundred times and you've got a book. So, I dunno. Its kinda boring work, but then you have a result. Alright. That's how to scan a book. This is my preferred method. Use a keyboard. Use one hand for the handlebar, the other hand for everything else. Stand up.