[OpenGLAM] mobile scanner

Fri Feb 15 19:56:33 UTC 2013

Earlier, I wrote:
> 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?

I should try to be more polite. Maybe there is a really good
reason for having a mobile scanning unit, but then you
need to explain why, because it isn't obvious. Please do.

When I hear of a new idea, I try to break it down into its
components. A mobile scanning unit is both mobile and
scanning. So what if you could have just one of those
components, which one would it be? What is more
important to you? This is a useful cognitive tool.

When the Internet was new, I was looking for new uses
for it. And I saw Project Gutenberg, which looked nice,
and so I combined its idea with my geographic location
and came up with the Scandinavian spinoff, the now
20 year old Project Runeberg. Ever since, I have been
waiting for more, larger, more serious book scanning
projects to come along. But when I see what these
Swedish archives and museums are doing, I realize
that they are indeed digitizing a lot, but not for the
purpose of making it publicly available on the Internet.

What I'm doing is to scan books in order to make them
publicly available on the Internet, a combination of
two ideas. My starting point is the Internet, so when
I don't scan books, I write articles for Wikipedia or
draw maps for OpenStreetMap. But the museums
and archives don't have the Internet as their origin.
They deal with old artefacts and documents, and
if they aren't showing them to physical visitors,
they might digitize them to put them in a computer,
but the Internet just isn't part of their world. Twenty
years after the World Wide Web, the idea that it
could be used to spread cultural knowledge just
hasn't reached our existing public institutions.

Most Swedish museums have a website, of course,
but just one that indicates their opening hours.
There are some very rare exceptions, and you can
find them by looking at what Wikipedia links to
as a reference.

Would these museums and archives be enthusiastic
if a mobile scanning center rolled up to their door?
Yes, perhaps, if they could announce it a week in
advance in the local newspaper, so local visitors
could come and see it (pretty, pretty), and become
visitors of the museum. (Sending a clown could have
the same effect, and be a lot cheaper. Would you
like to be that clown?) But for the benefit of
having their collections digitized and put online?
No, why, their collections are already digitized,
and stored safely in a computer in a back room.
These are institutions that proudly announce that
they "did" a digitization project back in 2006.
Digitization is a "been there, done that" thing.
It's not part of disseminating cultural knowledge.

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