osp blog

...quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day

Digitalising book for the Internet
Archive

A photo-reportage by Dave Bullock, published on the Wired, that shows the process of digitalising books for the Internet Archive. This process is still done manually due to the fragility of old books and their size variance.

"For those picturing an efficient, automated process involving robotic arms and high-tech scanners, the scanning at the University of California's Northern Regional Library Facility is relatively primitive. With monastic diligence, workers sit in book-scanning stations and manually turn pages all day long."