Friday, November 02, 2007

Digitizing Books - Day 3

For the past two years I've been learning about libraries, how the operate and some of the issues that we as a culture will have to deal with in the 21st century. I generally write about this stuff at http://pcclibtech.blogspot.com

I am not a librarian. Yet. If ever. But I am thinking about it more and more.


I want to show you a device that you ought to be aware of, you should know that the traditional book isn't going gently into the dust. But it might be transformed.

This is especially important for fragile or extremely old materials. They wouldn't stand up to this type of processing; there are gentler scanning methods for the at risk materials.

This is an just one small example of how that change is going to happen. I'm not endorsing any specific product. I literally walked up to this one and hit record.


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5 comments:

  1. Wow Gena, that was wonderful. Loved the dialogue over the machine explaining what we see. I'd love to see the results of those scans.

    Wonderful stuff. : )

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  2. Yet it was cool - I had been thinking about how older books would be transitioning into future generations hands or eyes at this point.

    The thing is it doesn't have to be text based or in a .pdf format. For visually impaired folks the book could be converted into a computer voiced audio narrative.

    I fully expect that a few years from now they will find a way to convert traditional books into automated computer generated movies.

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  3. very cool! it was a great book to shoot, with all the pics and stuff. this clip reminded me of something out of a weird scifi novel.

    and i can see your interest in things library-related. libraries are amazing.

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  4. That is one interesting machine. Thanks for showing it to me. Got my husband looking over my shoulder too - that man loves gadgets.

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  5. that's a cool machine. I always wondered how they did it - I assumed they got uni students to sit at the scanner and do it manually or ask people at home to transcribe like gutenberg. thanks for showing this!

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