We Are Not Alone

By James | January 27, 2009

Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that we’re not the only ones working in this area. From the NYTimes:

The Long Now Foundation is developing a software tool to easily convert documents between digital formats, said Stewart Brand, a co-founder of the project.

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2 Comments

  1. John Gilmore
    Posted February 3, 2009 at 5:18 pm | Permalink

    You’re following in the footsteps of the Internet Archive’s “Scribe” scanning workstations — which are much more expensive, partly because they use metal and glass, include the lights, use expensive cameras that only have proprietary Windows software, and counterweight the page flattener. Their Scribe costs tens of thousands of dollars. Yours costs maybe a thousand. Great!

    You may be able to use a bunch of software from them. They have scanned in a million books with this hardware, at half a dozen universities and museums — the software is pretty polished now :-) . See the books at http://www.archive.org.

    http://redjar.org/jared/blog/archives/2006/02/10/more-details-on-open-archives-scribe-book-scanner-project/

    http://redjar.org/jared/blog/archives/2006/02/10/more-details-on-open-archives-scribe-book-scanner-project/

    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140874

    Unfortunately, the Scribe software up on Sourceforge hasn’t been updated for a few years. I recommend talking to the Internet Archive directly (info@archive.org) and asking them to publish the current version.

  2. James
    Posted February 3, 2009 at 5:35 pm | Permalink

    I didn’t realize that software was around. I’ll ask archive.org for the latest code. There might be some very good overlap there. Thanks, John!