blog.mignault.net

Book scanners

MPOW is struggling towards getting digitization off the ground, and one of the things I’ve been looking at are book scanners. We often scan rare or fragile (Italian) material, so smooshing down a book onto a flatbed isn’t acceptable. I was surprised at how few vendors there are to choose from. There’s Kirtas, which makes a high-end machine that can do up to 2400 pages an hour. I saw one demonstrated at the BookExpo at Javits last week, and they’re very cool. The book is held in a cradle, and the pages are turned by means of a puff of air. It works quite well, and it scores very high on the Neat-O Scale. It’s very expensive, though, and we don’t have the necessary volume of material to be scanned to justify buying one of these. We’ve done some outsourcing to Kirtas, and been pleased with the results, but it’s overkill for us.

Then there’s the Atiz BookDrive DIY. Most book scanners have the same basic setup: a scaffolding encloses a platen for the book along with mounts for 2 digital cameras pointed at either page of the book. Atiz sells you the scaffolding and lets you pick the cameras yourself, thus the DIY. Atiz also makes something called the BookDrive, which supposedly enables fully unattended scanning. It’s a fully enclosed unit (reminded me of a toaster oven) that turns the pages of the book via an arm with a mild adhesive on it. It gives me the willies to even consider that.

I love the Scribe scanners that the Internet Archive is using, at least in part because I agree so strongly with the ideology and goals of the project, but again, we don’t have the volume to qualify for an on-site Scribe, and we will probably be doing some outsourcing to NYPL’s Scribe station later this year.

We already use a Minolta book scanner, and the Indus (ours are branded BookEye,) so I know about those already. But I haven’t really been able to find anything else, and you’d think there’d be more out there. Anyone know of any others?

Out of the past

Ending the radio silence.

I see that yet another WordPress update has occurred since I last edited this site. Anything worthwhile in it? I’ll probably update soon, but upgrading blog software doesn’t have the charm it once did. (Interesting how with all the improvements to desktop installers, upgrading blogging software is still such a mv/cp/tar xzvf-driven undertaking.) Back soon…

Hiatus

Due to some DNS problems, this site has been offline for a looong time. We appear to be back up now, and I should return to posting soon.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Keep it simple

Pete Lacey’s Weblog :: The S stands for Simple

Dev: (Reads WSDL spec). I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot. It’s not even internally consistent. And what’s with all this HTTP GET bindings. I thought GET was undefined.

I found this quite funny. I may be wrong, but I think I’m seeing a desire to move from the hideously complex protocols and tools of Enterrpise Development to simpler, more, dare I say it, agile (as in not encumbered with enough stuff to choke a mainframe) methods.

Adventures with the Foreign Auntie

EastSouthWestNorth: A Foreign Lady in Beijing

From all over the biking blogs, a Western woman in Beijing blocks a car from driving into the bike lane and stands her ground. As someone said on some bike blog, the best example of corking ever.

Technorati Tags: cycling, bikes

Another customer service vignette

When we bought the new car, one of the things we needed to do was transfer the EZ-Pass from my old car to the new. For those of you outside the NY Metro area, an EZ-Pass is a little transponder you attach to your car’s windshield. It allows you to drive through toll booths without having to stop and give money to the tollbooth attendant, making toll stops much quicker. Well, the EZ-Pass attaches to your car’s windshield with some industrial-strength velcro, except it’s not really velcro, it’s these hard plastic interlocking mushrooms that, unlike hook-and-loop Velcro, are the same on both faces of the tape. They have to be aligned before they’ll go together, and when they do, they click together in a very solid, satisfying way.

Well, I needed new EZ-Pass MegaMushroomVelcro for the new car, as the old MMV had gone away with the windshield of the 89 Golf when it was towed by the ADA (Donation.) Thinking that the MTA was the place to go, I went. And found no mention anywhere on that site of where or how to get new Velcro. There was an account area, but you needed to know your account number in order to get access. Not your name, not your zip. Your account number. Which is either on your bill, or on your EZ-Pass, neither of which most people have readily to hand. You’d think that they’d let you log in by name.

I ended up buying it on eBay for 7 bucks.

Technorati Tags: mta, ezpass, bad+customer+service, stupid

Subaru manual silliness

We just bought a Subaru Outback, and I managed to lose the manual for the on-board GPS system. So I went hunting on their site for the manuals. When I clicked on the download link for the first section (yes, they put the manual up on the site as separate sections, rather than one big pdf,) I was directed to a signup page for an account name, e-mail, etc etc. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Subaru wants me to pay 35.00 for a 72-hour period in which I can download no more than 50 of their PDF manuals. Pretty insane. I guess I better look harder for that manual, or stop by the dealer and ask for another copy. Who, in this day and age, wants to charge you for PDf copies of their manuals? This is our second Subaru (our first was a 99 Forester) and we’ve been very happy with the cars, but this is just stupid.

Technorati Tags: subaru, stupid, car, customer

No signing bonus.

Posted 9/22/2006: Chief Librarian, Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Are you interested in putting your library science education and experience to work in one of today’s most challenging, interesting and rewarding environments? Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions is recruiting for a Chief Librarian to manage the Detainee Library, under the direction of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Do you think they’ll actually get anyone for this job?

List processing

I can no longer remember where I got this but it’s quite good, and surprising, coming from a Perl geek like MJD.

[IWE] Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective

But a bigger advantage is that it makes it possible to write Lisp programs that reliably generate and transform Lisp source code. If you’re not used to Lisp, it’s hard to imagine how tremendously useful this is. People who come from the Perl and C world have a deep suspicion of source code transformation, because it’s invariably unreliable.

It really is all just lists, which is the simplicity that gives Lisp such power and also makes people suspect that they’re missing something. As “Paul” is quoted in the article saying:

Paul told me that he liked Lisp *because* there was hardly any syntax to remember, and it was all simple. “Everything’s an expression,” he said. “Every expresion (sic) gets evaluated. If you don’t want it evaluated, you put a quote on it. Simple.”

Technorati Tags: geek, programming, lisp

Unboxed and unviewed

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: amazon unbox Goes Live

I’ll be interested in the first reviews of his (sic) product.

Ok, here’s a review:

First, and worst, doesn’t work with a Mac. Surprising for Amazon, and right there a deal-breaker. You can only watch on an XP PC. Can’t burn to DVD (except as a backup that won’t play in a DVD player, and librarians love DRM, right?) So I guess I’d say it sucks.
Technorati Tags: geek, amazon, library, stupid, mac