[Digitalarchivists] IA Free Lunch

[newmy51 at gmail.com]

DA-List,

We had a rocking good meeting yesterday, chock full of Negro Modelo and
glass cutting, which go so remarkably well together that we now have a
fully installed, no-joke platen for our slowly but surely book scanner,
provided it turns out to be sufficiently non-reflective.  There was talk of
cameras (used Powershots to be scoured for at thrift shops by Felipe or
ebayed by yours truly), triggering mechanisms, firmware hacks and the
like.  The next step is a brain picking meet and greet session over at the
Internet Archive open lunch *today* at noon (which is free), for which I
will be RSVPing at least two of us in the next hour or so.  So far, John
and myself are in.  Felipe may or may not be able to make it.  Anyone else
who's interested should write back ASAP, or just show up at 300 Funston and
sweet talk your way inside (they're pretty friendly).  There is also a very
tentatively planned Ace Monster Toys trip for this coming Monday.

Both trips (IA today and AMT next week) are in pursuit of gleaning bits and
pieces of conventional book scanning wisdom from those nearby institutions
who have already been working with a Reetz scanner roughly equivalent to
our own or another for some considerable amount of time.  It was the
consensus of all yesterday that much of what could be considered basic
information on one aspect of the scanner or another was not easily
locatable in either the assembly PDF, forum or instructional videos, and
that some components (like the platen) don't appear to have been
standardized at all, leaving us with only the various opinions of forum
posters as to what option works best for them and their scanner, which
isn't necessarily the same as ours.  By rubbing elbows at IA and AMT, whose
cumulative human-hours spent on their very similar to identical scanners
are innumerable, we can see what they've settled on as the "best" choice in
everything from triggering to optimal megapixel values to OCR to ergonomics
and RSI reduction.

Since there appears to be a bit of lag time on the sending and receiving of
these emails (at least on my end), go ahead and call me if you're into
lunch today, assuming this message actually reaches anyone by 11:00AM.  My
cell is 5056709090.

Yours in Spores,

-Danny
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