[OpenGLAM] mobile scanner

[Sanna Marttila]

Dear Lars, all

The idea of this bus came up in a local GLAM groups session at the OKF winter summit in the beginning of this month. In my understanding the initial idea was to explore the possibilities to have such a bus (a caravan or other mobile unit) that would tour in some cities in Europe to promote openness and collaborate with local GLAM organizations prior to OKFestival. In the discussion somebody suggested that maybe the bus could have a scanning unit, hence the working title 'Scanning for Freedom'. :-) I believe that the idea of scanning books was not the main objective of this initiative, rather promotion of openness, doing things together and travel to OKFestival.  


all the best, 

Sanna



On 15.2.2013, at 18.50, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> 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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