Hello Lars,

"Scribe" refers to both the mechanical hardware used, as well as the
software. The Scribe software was designed in-house at the Internet
Archives. AIP Engineering designed the Scribe hardware, though we're
not mentioned anywhere on the Internet Archive site or in the press.
The design is owned by the Internet Archives, and releasing design
information would be done at their discretion. There was talk about
making the design public at some future date, but the design is not
public at this time. They may also be selling Scribes: I recommend
contacting the Archive to find out.

Brewster did approve making public a few pictures from the development
process, which you may find of interest.
http://aipengineering.com/scribe/index.html

Best of luck to you,

Tom

Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>
> In the last few years, an increasing share of the books added to
> Project Runeberg (runeberg.org, the Scandinavian e-text archive)
> have been digitally photographed rather than scanned. We always
> capture images of book pages before we run OCR, as an aid for
> proofreading, and images can be captured either way. This is a
> natural development, as digital cameras are getting better,
> cheaper and more common.
>
> So far we have improvised and tried various camera mounts. But we
> don't yet have anything like the "Scribe" stations that the
> Internet Archive uses, with dual cameras and a V-shaped glass to
> press down over the open book. Some webpages say these are
> developed by IA together with Kirtas Technologies or together with
> various universities. I don't see anything like this on Kirtas'
> website. Other webpages say they look very similar to the
> BookDrive DIY from Atiz. I've seen mentions of the bare Atiz
> BookDrive DIY being sold at $3500, which sounds a bit high.
>
> Is this something that we can buy in (Northern) Europe? Or should
> we try to build one ourselves? They don't look too complicated.
> If this was an open source design, where can one find blueprints?
> Are any patents involved?
>
> What is the best working interface between camera and computer?
> USB 2.0 for direct transfer? Or memory card? Or Firewire? Does
> the Internet Archive develop its own software for this? The time
> to get the images into the computer could decide how many pages
> one can capture per hour.
>
> Or is "Sribe" the name of the whole system (hardware+software),
> where the Atiz BookDrive DIY is just the camera mount?
>
> I know 600 dpi was the old standard for bitonal scanned images and
> that 300 dpi works fine with color scans. I've been looking for
> numbers on what the IA uses, and found some in
> http://www.openlibrary.org/details/openlibrary
> <http://www.openlibrary.org/details/openlibrary>
> where it says the Scribe can capture 300 dpi over 16 inches.
> That's an impressing 17 megapixels, suggesting that Canon EOS-1Ds
> Mark II cameras are used, which currently sell for US$ 7000.
> However, very few books are 16 inches (or 400 millimetres) tall,
> so if the IA has a handful such scanning stations it would be a
> waste to install the top cameras in more than one station. For
> smaller books one could get away with a pair of 10 megapixel
> cameras, such as the Canon EOS-400D, at around one-tenth of the
> price. And it probably gets cheaper next year.
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars@... <mailto:lars%40aronsson.se>)
> Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
> <http://runeberg.org/>
>
>