Hacker News Reader

Comment by vitovito | Hacker News Reader

There's still a few unanswered questions; the answers make a difference.

That said, the Internet Archive scans and preserves material for US$0.10/page, including storing it in one of their warehouses. 150 100-page magazines would be, uh, a US$1500 donation.

For that, you'd get ~300dpi scans (actually photographs) of each page, taken with a DSLR without damaging the magazine.

That's about the page count and what I donated to preserve the out-of-print works of Jan V. White: http://www.janvwhite.org

To get higher resolution scans, generally you either need even more expensive, larger format digital cameras (41MP gets you 8.5x11 at 600dpi), or multiple cameras stitching the photographs together, or to do destructive scanning, cutting the binding and feeding the pages through a high-resolution sheet-fed or flatbed scanner (don't do this).

View on HN

Hi Vitovito

Thanks for your reply.

>> Are you looking to do it yourself? No

>> Do you have a budget? The idea is to raise funds from government grants to pay for high quality scanning

>>Do you need to do it on-site or can you ship them somewhere? I'm assuming we'll need to ship the collection somewhere - ideally Sydney or Canberra but if there is a compelling case perhaps elsewhere - there would be a fairly high level of anxiety about losing the collection in shipping.

>>Are you expecting to preserve the physical magazines, or do you expect to destroy them in the process? To preserve, ideally perfectly.

While the Internet Archive sells and supports their scanning hardware, and there are community plans if you wanted to build your own, since you don't have a budget and don't want to do it yourself, perhaps the National Library of Australia's "Trove" project is a better avenue:

http://trove.nla.gov.au

They're a partner with IA as part of the Open Content Alliance, and they provide complete end-to-end non-destructive scanning and hosting services through the Trove site and software:

http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/digitisation-partner-guidelines

150 magazines * 100 pages * AU$1.65 for a "journal" page is AUD$24,750, plus whatever it will cost you to "negotiate and document reproduction permission with copyright owners."

(For that price you alternatively could buy the Internet Archive's scanner, but you'd still need labor to operate it. Or, for US$1750 you could get the parts for a DIY book scanner, and then use the rest of the money to hire people to build and operate it, which might cost less, maybe. The results wouldn't be guaranteed, however, as they would be through IA or Trove, and you'd still need to host it and the content somewhere.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com