An interesting piece was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week that archivists and librarians would be wise to read. Written by a researcher, it describes how he has put together his own setup to digitize archival material “on the fly” in his visits to do research.
Descriptively entitled “The Articulated Arm of an Archive Raider,” Konrad M. Lawson, a graduate student studying modern East Asian history at Harvard and self-styled “Prof. Hacker,” reveals his secrets for snatching scans of the sacred and profane:
I confess, I’m a raider. When permitted, or rather, when I encounter no explicit prohibitions from library and archive staff, I like to get copies of both information directly useful to a current research project, but also of materials which might be useful on future projects or for friends working on something similar. I move in, pillage what I can, and retreat to pick through the plunder in search of new targets for the next day. I’m an information pack-rat and I refuse to go into rehab. I know there are many of us out there.
Actually, his real secrets are revealed later, when he specifically describes and illustrates his setup:
“My own personal solution uses:
- Manfrotto 035RL Super Clamp with 2908 Standard Stud (around $30)
- Manfrotto 196B-2 143BKT 2-Section Single Articulated Arm with Camera Bracket (around $40)
- A wired camera remote for my camera (I use a Lumix GF1 but many cameras have wired or wireless remotes)
…The result is a system that allows me to browse through documents or a book and whenever I come to a page or section worth preserving, I can, without picking up a camera, tap my foot on the remote while turning pages or holding documents flat. By using an Eye-Fi memory card, the pictures I take are beamed directly and immediately from the camera to my laptop if configured for a local wi-fi network.”
The technical sophistication is astonishing, but at the same time unsurprising, as each of the pieces he has put together is neither difficult to find nor expensive. In other words, a personal digitization setup is both relatively inexpensive and trivial to put together and undeniably useful. It’s like note-taking on steroids.
All of this ties in so well with a report published by my employer, OCLC Research, “Capture and Release: Digital Cameras in the Reading Room” [PDF].
No related posts.
Hey, that’s neat. Certainly better than my old CanoScan LiDE 30 hooked up to a Dell Latitude D400 that I used to sneak into certain enormous research libraries located in upper Manhattan back in the day.
[...] 10th, 2010 | Comments Off blog.libraryjournal.com An interesting piece was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week that [...]
Many thanks for mentioning my post at Profhacker. I read the OCLC report “Capture and Release” you linked to with interest. Obviously, as an “archive raider” and a poor grad student where every day spent in an archive means another expensive night of housing and food to be paid for, I am in support of the “Shutter-bug” policy listed on the policy grid in the article that promotes preservation but is otherwise relatively open. NARA is a dream archive in this regard, though they have fewer copyright issues to confront.
Though it may be difficult to implement, I wonder if particularly ambitious archives/libraries might encourage voluntary turn-over of files, on a source by source basis before the archivist leaves. Given how cheap hard disk space is these days, if some mechanism could be provided that allowed users to transfer over images they took (which of course, will vary in quality and in terms of what pages were copied).
I believe this would have two advantages: 1) It would be a benefit to long term preservation under the principle of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and 2) both for preservation and accessibility: there may be ways to offer visitors the option of perusing available images for a given source, and select (a limited number, if under copyright) of relevant documents/pages to copy if the quality is good enough. This would facilitate rapid browsing and potentially reduce somewhat handling of the originals by those who find the existing images sufficiently good for their purposes.
Posted in a rush, my second paragraph was a bit of a mess.
archivist->user
if some mechanism->it would be wonderful if