[Digitalarchivists] Good News

[newmy51 at gmail.com]

DA-List,

The spontaneous decision to attend today's weekly open lunch at the
Internet Archive (hereafter referred to as IA) has born epic fruit.  We are
being loaned the requisite equipment to be a kind of beta tester of the DIY
kit for IA, which includes two professional Canon DSLRs plus lenses.  This
came as a result of conversations with Robert Miller (Global Director of
Books) and Jude Coelho (Digital Scanning Coordinator Princeton), with whom
we'll be working closely over the coming weeks/months(/years?) to help
streamline the DIY kit at both the hardware and software levels, since
there appear to be a lot of loose ends on the DIYBS forum which Reetz has
been too overwhelmed to handle (recent correspondence with Daniel revealed
that life had been "kicking his ass" as of late).  One might suppose that
the cost-free borrowing of 6-ish thousand dollars in hardware would be
enough good news, but wait... there's more.

IA will handle the vast majority of the workflow post-scanning on their
end, as well as host the resulting files (pdf, epub, djvu, jpeg), for
free.  These two links:

http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Uploading_Content
http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Texts_and_Books

go into great detail on how that all works.  I'm just beginning to digest
it all myself.  Portions of our conversation with Jason Scott (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott_Sadofsky) included
mention/explanation of some of this info, along with rapid fire
demonstrations of a dozen other righteously cool projects of his.

This will, at some point, possibly in the very near future (ie: Tuesday),
entail setting up a time to bring the kit to IA.  Dates aside, it will
require a car that can gently and safely transport the scanner to and from
IA.  Once it's back at Noisebridge, it will have at least an additional
$6000 of equipment attached to it, which presents some new questions with
regard to security.

I'm currently taking up the laser engraver terminal at NB, for which there
is a very patient gentleman waiting, so I'll leave it at that for now.
More to come in subsequent emails, one of which will be sent to the general
discuss list to brag to Noisebridge at large, hopefully inviting more
collaborators and/or donations as a result.

Overcaffeinatedly Yours,

-Danny
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