I'm gonna be busy!

[Pa SxS]

The BOD recently approved equipment to digitize our records. I've purchased a digital DSLR camera, copy stand, LED lights, remote shutter release, and memory card. We have 70+ stock books with 200+ pages in each folder and 100 order books/IBM books each with around 300 pages per book. This does not include various correspondence books. I've copied 4 stock books so far.

I built a platform and secured it to the copy stand base. I made small pieces of wood and glued them to the platform so all I have to do is drop the paper within the the border and it will be aligned with the camera. The LED lights are mounted behind and above the camera and shine directly down onto the paper. Push the remote control shutter release and the picture is taken. Take the paper off and put it in the alignment tray to the left of the copy stand and put another paper back on the copy stand. Pretty simple and organized. It's just going to take a lot of time to complete the project.

This shouldn't impact my doing research letters in a timely manner. It will probably take 1 1/2 hours to do each stock book.

[Eric Estes]

This is outstanding news. Thanks for sharing.

[Phil C]

Thank you for all of this effort. You are definitely doing a Great Service for all of us.

[Eric Estes]

Chuck, now all you will need is that "illegible fountain pen hand script" OCR software and you will be in high cotton.

Seriously though, thank you and the board for doing this. Electronic insurance against the unthinkable.

[Fishtail]

Very nice. Lots of thought and work went into that.

Will the digital versions be available to PGCA members?

[edgarspencer]

This has got to be faster than using a flatbed scanner. How is the quality? Could you post a random page so we can see the quality?

[Pa SxS]

Eric, don't I wish there was such an OCR program out there! It would be far superior to my brains OCR since I sometimes have trouble reading the words and letters.

Greg, that's a decision for the BOD but I doubt it.

Edgar, each picture is in the 6 to 7 meg range. I don't think the BOD would mind posting a random image. I'll try it but I don't know if it will upload due to it's size. I can tell you that I can really zoom in without loosing any quality. I can shoot a picture as fast as I can put the page on the platform, push a button, take the page off, and load another!

Well, the original file size is to large so I had to knock it down in size but you'll get a good idea of the quality.

[6pt-Sika]

90 minutes per book seems very fast to me !

More power to you !

[6pt-Sika]

Now once all this stuff is downloaded will it become available to be purchased on a disk ? By that I mean the entire thing ?

[Jim DiSpagno]

Great job Chuck. Do you have a ballpark figure on the cost of a disk? Wouldn't that decrease the number of requests for letters? What would prevent a person from providing letters once they purchased the disk? I know you would try to offset the cost of this equipment with sales of the disk but now you are the only game in town and that's a good thing.