Singing Potatoes
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Friday, 30 April 2004
Whew!

A while back, I mentioned a plan to scan in my filing cabinets full of books spanning nearly 400 years (as early as 1484, as late as 1881). The new multifunction copier/printer/scanner/fax at work is aiding greatly in this task, as it can grind through a stack of 100 pages in about two minutes.

Although it can scan directly to PDF, it can't separate two pages on the same sheet, so I've got to scan them to TIFF, then go in and copy each individual page out and paste it into OpenOffice, and build a PDF from there. Slow, but much faster than using my flatbed scanner, that's for sure.

Of course, it's not much good without a way to get at them, so today I wrote a Web front end for a database containing the usual bibliographic information (title, author, date, publisher, etc.) and permitting download of the PDFs. A little more testing and I should be able to release it publicly. There are only 27 books ready to disseminate so far (some of which are only excerpts), with twelve more big ones scanned but not converted to PDF, and a couple more drawers left to scan.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
Awesome!

One giant leap for free information.
Posted by Squelch on 1 May 2004 05:12