scanning woes

[holli]

Does anyone have any recommendations for scanning fragile documents? I've been lent a box of 1850s-1930s fashion magazines, in order to scan the illustrations, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to kill them just by putting them in the scanner.

The 1850s and 1860s Godey's Lady Books, in particular, are practically falling apart in my hands, and there's no way the binding would survive being laid flat in a scanner. There are some gorgeous images in these that I really want to get digital copies of, but I can't see how to do it without damaging them irreparably.

Comments

[flea]

Libraries solve this problem by using an overhead scanner (a major brand is Bookeye, but they cost $$$$), and foam wedges to keep the book open enough to scan, but not to break the pages/spine. You might try to create a similar setup using foam wedges and a camera mount and take photos of the pages.

Even in libraries, sometimes things are too fragile to be scanned - or even touched and pages turned - without damaging them. The preservation/access dilemma can be very tricky.

[holli]

Would it a be possible to find a library with a scanner who'd be willing to help me? The Godey's Lady Books, in particular, are full of stuff that historians might be interested in.

[flea]

UMD College Park has a library school - you might try to find a student interested in doing some collaborative project for a master's project? Unfortunately in my experience libraries that own Bookeye scanners keep them pretty busy with their own materials, and would not be very likely to be receptive to letting you use one. I think the best bet would be to call up the Archives and/or Rare Books libraries at large universities near you, explain your needs, and ask if they have anything available to the public that might be of use to you.

The Godey's Ladies' books are certainly of wide historical interest - indeed, I wonder if some of them have already been digitized.

[flea]

http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/godeys-ladys-book/

[holli]

Ah! Well, that solves that. So these particular originals do not need preserving.

[chocolatepot]

Well, yes and no. They don't need to be preserved-or-else-nobody-will-ever-see-this, but Accessible Archives is a subscription service and any digital images it owns aren't really out there. Obvs. your time is your own and as someone with a box of antique fashion magazines I understand how boring and time-consuming a task it is (I started to scan my 1834 Godey's and it just ... only came out fuzzy, I still don't know what I'm going to try to do with it), but it would be so super if you photographed at least just the fashion plates and their descriptions so they could roam freely on the internet.

[holli]

I am going to talk to the actual owner of the magazines and see if she's okay with me making the attempt.

[bcgphoenix]

Hmm. Is there any way you can get a handheld scanner? Or just photograph them with a digital camera? That may be your best (possibly only) bet -- if you think scanning them in a traditional scanner will damage them irreparably, don't do it. (Though to be honest, I'd be hesitant about using ANY kind of scanner on documents that old, due to the possibility of light damage. Doing this stuff for a living kinda makes me an overly nervous nelly.)

How do you plan to use the illustrations once they're scanned? Are you thinking of this like a digital backup project, or what?

[holli]

Well, originally I wanted color copies to use for the Valentine's workshop, since this stuff is way too nice to cut up. Now I think it would be worth making high-quality scans for historians and costumers, since there's some really interesting stuff in them.

Handheld scanners seem to start at the $40 mark, and the cheapest ones have pretty bad reviews. So unless I make a habit of scanning this sort of stuff in future (which I'm starting to think about doing!) it's not quite worth the expense.

[melannen]

I have gotten reasonably good digital copies of documents just using a digital camera on its highest quality setting and some really careful photography. It's not as good as a high-quality scan on a proper scanner, but for stuff where you have to be careful of the binding, it seems to be about as good as you can get without expensive equipment/assistance of a library, and it's good enough for most purposes.

(For really good archival-quality scans, digitizing projects usually just bite the bullet and destroy the original, as long as it's not unique...)