Thursday, June 07, 2012

Scanning sources; the conference


Who is going to he Impact event at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague? This was a question on one of the GLAM mailing lists. Living close by and having an interest in the digitisation and transliteration of source material made it obvious for me to volunteer. From what I understand from its website, the conference will inform me on the latest developments and many of the best practices. Obviously, I will blog about my understanding of them.

At the Alexandria Wikimania, many Wikimedians visited the scanning operation at the Library of Alexandria. They had an "assembly line" where books were scanned in an industrial process. This is quite different from the scanning operations employed by Wikisourcerers. Scanners targetted for home use are used often combined with the OCR software that came with them. At the Berlin hackathon I learned that it is best to OCR a document at the latest moment. OCR software is getting smarter and the improvements are noticable. I also learned that OCR is available from within many of the Wikisource projects.

Going to a conference is one thing, going well prepared is another. It will help when I have a better understanding in the operation of Wikisource, when I know about what we do well and where we can improve. It will help me understand the relevance of what will be presented in the Hague.

To be prepared, I will have to learn more about Wikisource and I will blog about what I learn.
Thanks,
    GerardM

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