[OpenGLAM] mobile scanner

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Fri Feb 15 16:50:04 UTC 2013


On 02/15/2013 09:47 AM, Sanna Marttila wrote:
> Now it feels this idea could actually happen :-)

Do you want to paint a bus, travel, and meet wonderful
people, or do you want to digitize books, or do you want
to provide digitized information that people find useful?
Which aspect (bus, scan, access) is more important to you?

If you want to paint a bus, it's easier if you skip the
complicated part with scanning books. Make it a peace
mission or something.

Lots of Swedish archives and museums digitize their
collections without publishing anything. The digitized
materials are locked in to servers the public can't use.
This is a useful path if the very digitization is important
to you, but public access is not. In your own country,
Finland, the national library has digitized thousands of
old magazines and journals, but they are published on
a server that Google doesn't index, to make sure that
people who search for information can't find it.

If you want to provide useful information, then you
should start with the readers. They use Google to find
facts, and often but not always the facts are provided
by Wikipedia. Add topics to Wikipedia! To do this, you
need to cite literature. Sometimes books are available
online already, but in other cases good books need to
be scanned. The Internet Archive has a wonderful
project for digitizing books, a project that is currently
underutilized. If you can look up a book in the library
of the University of Toronto, you can make them scan
the book and put it online. This is a lot of boring work
that you do in front of a computer, alone, that brings
useful information to people. (Or you could negotiate
with the Finnish national library to open their servers,
which takes some time, but doesn't involve any bus
painting.)

If you would rather paint a bus, why scan books? Why
do you have to pretend that your bus-painting project
has anything to do with book scanning?


-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/






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