Tech Tips
Digitizing Documents
Documents rarely have intrinsic value. The exceptions often deal with outstanding historical individuals or events. A marriage license for your great-grandparents may be priceless to you, but have no discernible sales value in the market place.
Whenever I discuss digitizing as a method of preserving a book or document, I feel that it is important to point out the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic value. A rare or limited edition book may have some intrinsic value, while a family history book from the 1900s may only have extrinsic value. The question is, are you interested in the book or document because of its existence as a book or document or merely because of the information it contains? How you answer that question determines to a large extent how and why you will make the effort to preserve the book or document through making a digitized copy. In the area of genealogy it is not unusual for a relative to have written a surname book, that is, a book about one of your remote ancestors. Unfortunately, many of these family books, although they have no market value, have great value to the family. Further, some of these books and documents are virtually unique. I have several books that were published by family member that do not appear in any library or book vendor on the Internet and it would be nearly impossible to find a copy. If you have one of these books or documents that are of interest to other family members, you should seriously consider sharing the books and the documents through digitized copies. Just to be clear, scanning or taking a digital picture of the pages of a book or document results in a digitized file of the book or document, and the product or computer file is referred to as digitized.
Scanning is one of the main ways books and documents are digitized. A scanner is a dedicated device that takes a computer or digitized image of a document similar to a photocopy, but instead of printing out the file, you save the resulting digital file to your computer. There are a variety of scanners for sale for a great variety of prices depending on the speed, quality and defensibility of the units.
Why do you have to worry about whether the document or book has intrinsic value? Commonly, with books of common or little value, a copy of the book is cut apart to enable the book to be scanned on a flat bed or sheet fed scanner. You certainly do not want to do this if the book or document has some collectable intrinsic value. The problem that is solved by cutting book out of its binding is the curvature of the pages caused by the book binding. If the book is too valuable to sacrifice in this way, you may wish to look into having the book scanned by a professional scanning company using expensive book scanning equipment. Another possibility is to build the book scanning equipment yourself. The idea is to create a cradle for the book that holds the pages flat, allowing them to be scanned or photographed at a 90 degree angle with a digital camera. There are a number of websites that discuss the techniques of building your own digital book scanner. Here is a list of a few of the sites:
Gadget Lab, DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes
Hack N Mod, How T: DIY High Speed Book Scanner
UberReview, DIY: Build Your Own Book Scanner For Less Than $20 (as Long as You Have the Camera)
The key to all of these devices is the need to have the camera at a 90 degree angle to either the book page or the document. For documents, flat bed scanners solve the problem in nearly all cases. Where scanners have problem, you can resort to either taking multiple digital camera images of a large document and using photo stitching software to make a composite, or putting the document on a flat surface and taking a digital image from far enough away to capture the whole document in one shot. If you are using cameras for digitizing documents, the higher the quality of the camera and lens, the higher the resulting image quality. You may find that an inexpensive 10 or 12 megapixel compact camera makes an acceptable image for your purposes. However, archivists for museums and record repositories use very high quality and therefore expensive camera systems.
Now I have come around full circle. You start with the value of the book or document, and that determines whether or not the item is worth digitizing. If digitizing is desirable, then you select a method that produces the level of quality you need to preserve the document or book. With both books and documents, images are best made at a 90 degree angle to the page. Flat bed scanners do this automatically. If you use a digital camera to make the image, you may have to spend some time solving the problem of how to capture a flat image of the book or document.
