The other day a couple of colleagues came by asking if I’d take a look at an equipment proposal they were putting together for a new planetary scanner (and no, that’s not the sort of thing you find lying about the SETI equipment room). They’re interested in something like the Bookeye for scanning delicate (and oversize) materials kept in our Special Collections area.
During my “due diligence” on planetary scanners, I discovered a system that might not be great for some of the archival tasks they envision performing, but for book and newspaper scanning I think it’s a much better fit: The Atiz BookDrive DIY.
If you’ve seen the Scribe Station developed by Internet Archive for book scanning, the BookDrive DIY from Atiz will look familiar.
A couple of Canon DSLR’s pointed at a sliding glass V cradle, cameras controlled by an application running on a nearby PC. I spent about 30 minutes reading all I could both on the Atiz site and around the web then sent an exploratory email to the vendor.
A few hours later I received a note back from Nick Warnock, asking me to give him a call. His first sentence was a real surprise:
“Hey, I’m glad you called and I just wanted to tell you that the President of the company said to be sure and give you guys a discount—he got the idea for the scanner while working on his PhD at Mason.”
That was surprising and so too was the fact that I later learned Nick Warnock was something of a minor celebrity himself—a finalist on NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
Costing 75% less than the planetary scanner, the Atiz BookDrive DIY looks interesting and if Nick and company come through with any sort of discount, I think we’ll be purchasing one of these for the digital production services group we’re putting together. Our Special Collections area will have their planetary scanner but we should be able to find plenty of use for the BookDrive DIY as well. For example, I think it would be pretty cool to scan a few books and upload them to the Open Content Alliance.