Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[aslambilal]

Hello, my name is Bilal Aslam and I just started law school this year up at Syracuse. ( Big change from doing undergrad in computer engineering lol )

After buying books, and walking around with them for a week or so, i realize its not that good to have 50+lbs on your back day in day out. So after no luck finding my books online i need to find a book scanner. I would prefer to buy a pre built system and just do the scanning myself.

Hopefully univershul's offer to make one more is still available since his post kinda died 3 weeks ago.

Otherwise i'd love to build one myself, however i would need something extremely simple since i dont know if i have access to the campus workshop to make my own parts.

[Neil_M]

I started doing scanning and OCR back in the late 1980's at a firm I worked for. I've done a fair bit since.

[pathall]

Hi folks,

Finally found time to introduce myself here. I'm amazed by the depth of creativity and ingenuity this project has engendered. Y'all are way leet.

I'm a linguist, and I've been working with legacy documentation of Native American languages. You may be aware that traditionally linguists worked by using what they called "fileslips" (or "slipfiles"): slips of paper with definitions of words, or with example sentences, grammatical notes, etc. These slips were used, of course, because they were sortable. Linguists would end up accumulating boxes full of such slips, and would eventually use that archive as a source to develop a printed dictionary.

Unless they didn't finish. Which all too often is the case. Such fileslip dictionaries of many languages have never been published, although they are housed in archives all over the world.

When I discovered such a dictionary existed for the language that I was studying, I felt compelled to find a way to digitize all circa 17,000 slips of it. Although I had essentially no experience in photography or archiving, it was plainly apparent to me that the archive where the dictionary was housed could not possibly hope to scan all the materials: they are scandalously underfunded, and the there is simply no way for the dedicated but overworked staff there to realize such a project with their flatbed scanner.

After a little digging I came across CHDK, and started experimenting. A very early writeup of those experiments is available at http://ruphus.com/digitize/story.html. As you can see at that link, the "solution" that I came up with was almost laughable: I stuck a camera in a cardboard box, and set up CHDK to take a picture every few seconds. About 17,000 × ≈4 seconds later, I was done.

There are some interesting parameters to this sort of project that distinguish it from scanning books:

• * it doesn't seem strictly necessary to use platen glass, since the fileslips are small enough not to warp.
• * the materials are almost all manuscripts

My hope with the language I'm working on is to get the scans into the hands of the remaining speakers of the language. I also have hopes to build a web-based transcription tool to achieve the lofty goal of searchability.

So that's my story. I'm super stoked to find this community, because I no longer feel like I'm alone in the wilderness, and better still, I feel like I now stand a reasonable chance of helping other linguists to replicate and improve on my efforts.

[SEaustralia]

Have been reading and following with great interest.

I have built a rather agricultural version of the http://bkrpr.org/blog/ type of scanner.

At the moment I am limited by only possessing a 5MP canon A450. Quality is decent for personal consumption but not to archive.

Will be saving for canon 490, currrently AUD130 locally.

Thank you to the Board for many ideas and particularly I appreciate Joseph Artsimovich's Scan Tailor - very powerful and time saving.

George
Castlemaine
Victoria, Australia.

[daniel_reetz]

George, if and when you have time and interest, we'd love to see pictures of your scanner.

[Mondotofu]

Hello Thread --
Thirty years ago I had a student job at the Georgia Newspapers Project ( http://www.libs.uga.edu/gnp/ ) where I prepared old and crumbling newspapers for the microfilm cameras by taping up tears and flattening folds and creases with a hot iron. I wondered why they couldn't be OCR-ed, too, but preservation was the key, even though the process wasn't non-invasive.

Some twenty-five years later I had a hand in optimizing information retrieval software on one of the largest corporate digital archives in the United States. My database engineering experience has taught me a lot about designing and maintaining scalable information systems.

Lately, I've been interested in simplifying, summarizing, and correlating text by generating tag clouds ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud ) on data sets as an easy visual information retrieval interface.

My personal interests :
* My wife has a sizable collection of books ( 60 linear shelf meters in all).
* I have a tiny collection of legal documents that I would like to OCR and store, making the pages (and their metadata) accessible with the beagle ( http://beagle-project.org/Searching_Data) search engine mentioned earlier in the Hello Thread.
* My son just got a Kindle and wants to store his school text books on it.
* I am happy using my Palm Tungsten T3 for reading books. At the very least, I can listen to MP3s while reading and commuting on the bus.

Many people enjoy having texts read to them and this could be a great connection. A great source for free audio books is Librivox ( http://librivox.org/ )

I support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) such as Gnu/Linux and dislike schemes like Digital Rights Management (DRM) that lock content down to particular platforms that may go out of style or break in 5 - 10 years, thus breaking continuity and assuring that we succumb to technological fascism pushing us to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade! thus perpetuating the market for owners of copyright (and not necessarily the rights of the creative community who generated the content).

Surely the resilience of books has beat high technology in this regard, but there we are stuck with paper again. Hmm... that iron plugged in ?

[KevinISlaughter]

I'm a bibliophile and a bit of a building nerd. Though I haven't done anything terribly remarkable in the latter (small projects here and there, rather unskilled), I've spent quite a bit of time scanning books for myself and various projects over the years.

I was forced to write a short bio for a book I published a few years ago though Scapegoat Publishing, and now use a modified version on my website and where it's useful. The fact that it's largely a list of author names is telling in two ways - one, the type of topics I enjoy and want others to know I enjoy, and two, that I think these books/writers are so important they serve as shorthand for my own interests:
---
Kevin I. Slaughter is a vulgarian and elitist, half son of the South, half child of Mother England. He owns the 3rd largest private collection of vintage Super 8mm porn on the East Coast, plus an extensive library of adult paperbacks. Other than smut, his bookshelves are littered with titles by authors with names such as: Ardrey, Batille, Buchanan, Burroughs (E.R.), Crisp, Dahl, Darwin, Dixon, Friedman, Fussell, Galton, Gilmore (J & P.H.), Goad, Goffman, Gresham, Hammett, Hecht, Hitchens, Hoffer, Home, Huysmans, LaVey, LeBon, Legman, London, Lovecraft, Ludovici, Malebranche, Mencken, Mishima, Moynihan, Nietzsche, Parfrey, Petros, Pinker, Putnam, Rand, Reich, Rockwell, Rushton, Sante, Shermer, Sotos, Southern, Spengler, Spillane, Stirner, Thompson, Tully, Twain, Waters, and Willeford.

He admires the outsider genius, the architects of their own worlds–opinions be damned. He is uncomfortable with false dichotomies, understands that however rational he tries to be, his consciousness is controlled in part by genetically borne biases and his understanding of the world is skewed by the poor construction of biology that nature has evolved. Either way, he still thinks he’s right and you’re probably wrong.
---

Besides running Scapegoat Publishing with a partner (the project is currently slumbering) I have my own small publishing venture, Underworld Amusements.

I'm very excited and impressed by the work being done by members of this forum, and hope to get my own non-flatbed book scanner running within the next 6 months.

[Madmanden]

Hello everyone.

My name is Chris and I live in Denmark. I've been interested in book scanning for a while. My first attempt was as simple as can get - using a flatbed scanner to scan books to PDF, no OCR or postprocessing done. I quickly got tired of this method though due to the speed and filesizes (and lack of OCR).

Fast forward to early this week when I got my first ereader, a Kindle 3. Amazing device. So now I've once again become interested in digitizing my books in the fastest way possible. Only trouble is that I'm a student and can't afford to spend a lot of cash on it right now. So I'm experimenting with ultra-low-budget scanning at the moment.

Anyway, nice to be here. I'm looking forward to learning a lot and hopefully giving something back in return!

[ramen77]

Hi Everyone,

Just came across this as I was looking for something to help me study for some promotional exams - our textbooks and manuals don't come in digital format so I was looking into some ways to help me fix that.

Been thinking of trying to build one, but the wiring portions has me a little spooked (I'm a complete idiot when it comes to that). We'll see how it goes!

Thanks for putting up such a great resource for everyone

[abmartin]

My name is Andrew and I am a graduate musicology student in Ohio. I work mainly with Elizabethan music, but teach nearly everything. (Two weeks ago, I was teaching Indian music, and in seven days start a rock music history class - which is way more difficult than you might think)

I've been lurking on the site for a long time, and now feel that I have things to contribute as I have graduated from a taped-foam board+tripod approach to a newly-built New Standard. I have to decide which camera route to go - either to purchase a new Pentax K-x and matching prime lenses or to try out a couple used cheap cameras. Thanks to the great strides of post-processing, the optics of an SLR seem less necessary. I am so impressed with the hardware and software work that this community has created in such a short time.

The main purpose of my build is to create a digital archive of some of the most important reference material for my discipline. As there are only a few thousand of us engaged in serious musicological research, our works don't get reprinted very often. The wonderful work of archive.org (and, grudgingly, google, as much as it pains a dedicated free software/culture activist to say) has not translated into my field, I suspect due to the problems of indexing musical material. (OCR can barely handle the most basic of modern printed notation and can't deal with any historical notations at all) Many of the most important sources for my field (especially in liturgical/chant studies) are late-19th century and only exist in several hundred copies in the world. It's time to digitize these books before they fall apart for good. At some point post-graduation, I hope to be able to offer reprints of some classic sources through a POD service and add a dollar or two above cost as a donation to our national society.

I don't have the engineering or software background to offer any real assistance to the community, but I hope to be able to provide insights as an end user.