How best to digitize old documents, photos and clippings?

October 20, 2015 11:33 AM

I'm looking into the options for getting a sports club archive online. The archive consists of a couple of thousand documents, photos and newspaper clippings, stretching back a few decades. They are currently held in loose leaf folders, each item pasted onto an A4 page. I have a scanner and could scan them all, but am wondering if there is a better solution, as this would take a lot of time. They won't go through a feeder without damage.

I doubt this could be outsourced to professional archive scanners, I suspect the cost would be too high, though I haven't approached any for a quote.

I am considering jerry rigging some sort of rostrum camera (I have a DSLR and some lighting equipment). I think this would be faster than scanning.

There are probably options and issues I haven't considered and would welcome input.

Once I have the archive scanned I will be looking at some sort of CMS to organise and maintain it. I am familiar with Wordpress, any plugin suggestions are welcome, or alternatives.

posted by zingzangzung to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

There's an app (or 10) for that, here are 3.

Here's someone's first week into scanning their entire photo collection, which is a lengthy write-up on their process.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:39 AM on October 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks filthy light thief. The problem with the apps is I don't think my phone camera is good enough. My DSLR would do it if I set up a rostrum, but will mean manually organising. I'm not too concerned about that though, the archive is well organised and should be straightforward to deal with translating that organisation to the images.

That guys experience is interesting, I was thinking around 2 minutes per scan, which fits in with his experience. If I do this though, I won't have the luxury of doing small amounts at a time, I'll have to do it all fairly quickly.
posted by zingzangzung at 11:57 AM on October 20, 2015

a rostrum / planetary camera setup would definitely be the fastest -- We found that it was hard on the shutter of the Canon DSLR we were using (had three replaced under warranty) but it's definitely fast. Put as many pictures on the platform at once, and crop in software.

To consider DPI, set up your system and lay a yardstick across it. Use this to measure how big the area you're photographing is: a 16MP camera produces approximately 4608 x 3456 photos; if you can only see two feet of the yardstick in your photo, that's 3456 divided by 24 inches, or 144DPI -- not very good, about fax quality. Make sure you have enough megapixels and are zoomed in enough that you're getting effective DPI of at least 200 - 300.

Being zoomed in affects the focus plane, so make sure you can focus properly so you don't have a bunch of fuzzy pictures.

The flatbed scanner may be slow, but if you can fit multiple documents into it at one time, and crop them in Photoshop/whatever, will get you probably the best quality.

note: I'm project manager for a document imaging company
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:34 PM on October 20, 2015

Oh, I just noticed the part about getting quotes: professional digitization companies will probably charge you about $0.15 to $0.25 per image delivered (maybe more since these are 'delicate' and require special care); compare that to what your time is worth.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:14 PM on October 20, 2015