The Joys of Scanning Chapbooks!

Hey all! Just making a quick update tonight as to how the scanning of my chapbooks has been going. As I mentioned in my last post this week is being dedicated to the scanning of my chapbooks and it is certainly taking up a bit more of my time than I first imagined. Yesterday I spent close to 5 hours in the scanning room and was able to fully complete five chapbooks. Four of the chapbooks were 8 pages long with the last one being 24 pages. Luckily by the time I had reached the longer of the chapbooks I had created a process that made things quicker and had become a lot more comfortable with the tools that I was using. While the scanning process isn’t particularly difficult it is certainly time consuming and I will blog about the few difficulties I ran into:

Firstly, as I mentioned in my last post, these items are very fragile and they require some patience and care when handling them so as not to cause damage. It is hard however to not have flakes of the pages fall off, which going unnoticed, can be seen on the scanned images. When this occurs the scanner must be cleaned down and the image re-scanned.

Another issue that occurred came when attempting to scan chapbooks that have been bound into a collection of multiple chapbooks. These bound collections are about an inch in width and do not flatten very well onto the scanner. This makes it much more difficult to capture a useable image and a great deal of readjustment is sometimes necessary.

My final issue applies more to the larger chapbooks, as I ran into this problem when scanning the 24 page chapbook. Once an image (page) is scanned it is automatically saved into a folder with a specific filename. If you aren’t paying attention when choosing a file name (Each chapbook as its own file name with only the pg # changed) it is easy to get lost and lose track of what exactly has been scanned.

Again not all of these issues are too big of a deal but they certainly add to the “time consuming” aspect that I mentioned earlier. I have about 5 chapbooks left to scan and unfortunately they are all 24 pages long with two of them being in the problematic bound collection. As of right now my hope is to have these done by Friday as long as I spend both Thursday and Friday working on it. Unfortunately I am not the only one in the group who also plans to use this time so some collaboration will certainly be necessary.  

Anyways, so much for the short update. I guess I had more to say than I originally thought. Good luck to everyone this weekend with moving forward on their projects. It blows my mind that the semester is almost over.