Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[bridgji]

I'm Jim. I like tinkering with things and am also looking into scanning some family documents. My Great Grand Parents ran a boys camp from 1900 – 1944. We have detailed logs and photo albums from that time we want to digitize to preserver them. I hope to be able to build a rig to digitize them.

[daniel_reetz]

Jim, thanks for the introduction. Sounds like a great project -- I'm looking forward to helping out where I can. It would be very interesting to see samples of these docs!

[JonEP]

Greetings all,

I am a ph.d. student (sticking with it, but sympathetic, Daniel -- this is year 10 in grad school for me and life has sped past me while I mark time by the page), with a pretty huge library of books and papers. I've been trying to get all of my papers in digital form, and thinking about getting some of the critical books digitized as well, to make it easier for me to write from the road.

I think I am going to build 'the new standard model' as soon as there is a stable set of instructions. This is a very cool site and cool set of projects here.

Jon

[littletailw]

Hi:
My name is Bolu. I finally found the forum which focus on solving the digital book/library problem I am interested in.
I am currently a student at Harvard. I hope to find solutions and friends here.

Bolu

[Joe Reeser]

Well, my name's Joe. I've been lurking around here for some time and I am planning on doing a build in the fairly near future. There are so many good ideas here It's hard to digest everything. My main thrust is developing a universal camera mount and operating mechanism. I pretty much have that figured out, I think. I start some pretty long hours at work tomorrow that will last for the next three weeks so my time will be very limited to spend on this. I plan on posting a "proof of concept" thread when I do the final build of the camera mount and mechanism. That may take a few weeks, however. I don't wish to post any details right now because it might not work. If it does, however, any camera should be able to be used to take the pictures with a simple (and cheap) mechanism to trigger the shutter. Wish me luck and hope it works. Thanks for such a great site.

[daniel_reetz]

Joe, wishing you lots of luck, and please share even if it doesn't work! Cheers!

[intermediatic]

Hi, I'm Don and I teach at a big, nameless university. I have to travel and commute a lot plus, I want to get rid of as many books as possible. I have an Opticbook Plus book scanner and have been eagerly following the progress of Chris Berry over at SANE in getting a universal scanner driver running for it (in my case, I'd love to use it with my Mac).

[dalgard]

Hi. My name is Kristian. I'm currently in the process of researching the possiblity of opening a small shop, where customers would be able to scan books and get a searchable copy of the text. I'm not looking for legal advice or advice on entrepreneurship, but am rather trying to find out how far the development of the whole software side of the matter has come.

I am reasonably fluent with most web standards and would definetely not shy away from participating in the development of the tools I need. On my own, though, I probably wouldn't get very far, and in any case it certainly wouldn't be a feasible project for me.

The end product that I ideally would like to offer my customers is something along the lines of Google Books on a disc (besides selling e-readers and general print/copy jobs). My searches on this forum hasn't been able to tell me precisely what I need, so I shall now post a new thread with the hopes of not making a fool of myself with naïve questions...

Thanks you - and hoping that my future on this board will be both productive and fun!

... Oh, and of course I am also looking into building my very own book scanners in a not so distant future!

[TonyDart]

Hello
I'm Tony, English, and for the last 5 years have been running a charity for blind and print-disabled in the UK. We scan, OCR and put the result in an on-line Library at www.seeingear.org (restricted to disabled people in the EU). We used to use a guillotine and Canon DR9080C scanner - have just bought an Atiz BookDrive - then I saw your site! Currently using commercial software for OCR (FineReader 8, 9 and 10, and OmniPage 17) and Prime 4.5 once we have finished the error-checking software.

Hoping to set up a 5 workplace scan/edit facility this summer and dream of doing decent research into page analysis/automatic feature extraction so that the OCR'd image could be automatically converted into multiple formats - for example, if you read a book for pleasure using synthetic speech you want page numbers and running heads removed, but if you are studying the same book in class then you need these references in order to be able to study alongside sighted peers.

[2sls]

Hi All,
My name is Paul- and I'm a Ph.D student at Stanford. Thought this was a really cool idea, and orders of magnitude cheaper than commercial products which I cannot afford. If anyone in the bay area has already completed their own DIY or are thinking about starting one, please let me know as I wouldn't mind doing it collaboratively.