A4 flat bed scanner

[Association Secretary]

Hello.

As many of you know, the Association has embarked on a number of Projects of late. After the wonderful gesture of Association President Bob Wyatt with his gift of the copyright of his book Motor for the Million, one of those Projects is to produce a revised edition of his book to celebrate the Centenary in 2022. 

A team has now been put together to focus on this and one of the first things we would like to do is scan and convert to editable text an edition of the book. We have a willing volunteer in Timothy Payne (thanks Timothy!) to undertake this task but I have said to him we will provide him with a decent scanner for his use. 

What I am wondering is, is there someone who might be prepared to donate or loan a suitable scanner to Timothy for the task at hand. The scanner would need to be able to scan at at least 300dpi and be 'TWAIN' compliant (though in truth, many scanners would be both of those).

Any offers would be very gratefully received and can be sent to secretary@a7ca.org

vary many thanks in advance

Hugh

[Jeff Taylor]

Although sadly I don't have a suitable scanner to loan / donate, if you're planning to scan an original book, then something similar to the unit below would seem ideal - though unfortunately this particular model doesn't appear to be TWAIN compliant. Would the County Archival / Conservation Services you've used to date not have something similar ? I'd be surprised if they didn't.

https://www.thescannershop.com/fujitsu-s...k-scanner/

Jeff.

[Association Secretary]

Thanks for the suggestion Jeff. We have bought the cheapest copy possible of the last edition published and will cut each page out for scanning, so such a sophisticated approach won't be necessary. A simple A4 flat bed scanner will do nicely if anyone has one...

Hugh

[austin]

Ebay is your friend

When I started scanning the LAT archive glass plates I bought an old Epson flatbed scanner like this one for about £10. Works a treat, TWAIN etc etc. More than capable for what you want to do.

Whenever I scan documents now I use an app on my iPhone. Seems good enough for what I want to do, haven't tried to extract the text from them though. It's always tricky to get accurate "live" text from scans.

If I was doing something like this now I would use a decent digital camera and tripod set up, a lot quicker than scanning each page.

See Motorsport & Gramophone online archives for instances where it hasn't quite worked as well as you would hope. (I was involved in both these projects so know the pain involved!)

[Association Secretary]

Thanks Austin. I'd already had a look at Ebay and that will be my Plan B. I've been experimenting with FREE OCR which seems very capable in the OCR side of things.... If we can master it, I think it will support OCR direct from the scanner rather than having an intermediate step....

Hugh

[austin]

Thanks Austin. I'd already had a look at Ebay and that will be my Plan B. I've been experimenting with FREE OCR which seems very capable in the OCR side of things.... If we can master it, I think it will support OCR direct from the scanner rather than having an intermediate step....

Hugh

If it was me I would start by just taking photos of the pages and uploading into that tool and see what happens.

[Austin Carr]

Have you looked at hiring an OCR scanner or using a scanning service? There are a number of companies on the net but I can't see any prices.

I presume to make the scanning easier, quicker and if you do use a scanning service, less expensive, you are going to sacrifice one book and cut it up into individual pages.

[Association Secretary]

Yes - we will sacrifice a copy of the book. We have already purchased one for £8 on Ebay, so we don't feel too bad about destroying it.. As 'Austin' made reference to earlier, 2nd hand scanners can be purchased quite cheaply and would be perfectly adequate for the task. Getting this done professionally would be prohibitively expensive, I think... And we have a willing volunteer who will carry out that task - it's not a time critical undertaking so as long as it is done by (say) the Spring, that will be fine...

[Association Secretary]

Thank you to the many people who got in touch with the offer of a scanner or various suggestions. They were all gratefully received. I'm happy to say that we now appear sorted and a trial with the new set up has produced editable text that we can start work on. This won't be a quick project, of course, we are expecting the task to take a number of years to complete... But we have made a start and have assembled a good team...