[Digitalarchivists] Dispatch

[crw at crw.io]

On 10/28, newmy51 at gmail.com wrote:
> Has anyone spoken up yet at a meeting about establishing a fixed location for the scanner?

Not at a meeting, no, but we've made contact and come to an agreement
with the folks using the dark room. The shelving inside will be
re-arranged, and we'll get the far left corner of the room for the
scanner. We've taken measurements and it should just fit. It probably
won't be comfortable, but it'll be a home for the unit. I'll also note
that we probably won't have a lot of room for a standard form-factor
computer and monitor. We should think about pooling some resources to
source a raspberry pi or bugging the IA for one.

> Any word from IA? 

No, but I didn't know we were expecting to hear from them. Do we have
a point of contact that I can send questions to? Off the top of my
head, I've got the following questions/concerns:

Is there a standard image format we want to use? JPG vs. RAW vs.
whatever?

Is there a standard for encoding information about the book in the
image's EXIF data? x-isbn or x-book-title or x-book-author or
something similar?

It looks like IA has a JSON API, but at first glance it looks like
it's for reading data that's already there, not for uploading new
stuff. Am I missing something? The same question applies to
interacting with the new Open Library.

Is there a best practices guide that already has all this information
that I just don't know about yet?

At this Thursday's meeting we'll be putting the scanner back together
and refining our shell script with niceties like auto-detecting the
cameras, accepting input of book metadata to be including in the EXIF
data, finalizing filenames to reflect book title and page numbers (is
there a standard there, too?) and adding an audio cue (probably
system beep to start, or maybe play a .wav) when the script is ready
for another button press. We'll also probably start talking about the
uploading component of the process as well.

> Back to the mountains...  More soon.

Enjoy your trip! Stay safe!

-chris.