Hi Helen,
One aspect you need to decide on is the image quality you require. If you're digitising this material with long term archival in mind, you may need something that scans to a higher resolution than the Mini-Scanner, and something with higher quality optics. I believe that you need to aim for at least 300dpi for text and up to 600dpi if you're scanning images related material (I'm not including specialist material such as photographic transparencies here though). The Mini-Scanner is excellent though and very practical due to it's size and small foot-print. So if it's difficult for you to move the material to be scanned, it's an excellent choice if you need to take the scanner to the material. But if you have lots to scan over a long period of time, and you have a spare desk, you might want to consider a more permanent installation such as the i2S eScan, or perhaps something larger that can handle A2. And usch a device can output directly to your local networked storage. But the price will jump up considerably with such devices, possibly 10 times the cost of the Mini-Scanner.
As for OCRing, I get very good results from Adobe Acrobat Professional, assuming that you're considering storing text documents in PDF format.
Regards, Ben.
________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Bleck, Helen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 28 January 2013 09:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Recommendations for scanners to digitise archival records
Hi all,
We're hoping to start digitising some of our records (ranging across text, script, maps, plans, drawings etc), and also investigating the possibility of OCR-ing some of them. Our records have to stay here, we can't send them out to be scanned. And we have a fairly restrictive budget!
We've been looking at BDM Technology's Mini-Scanner (A3 and A4 sizes - I think we'll probably get more out of the larger one). Has anyone any experience of this scanner? And does anyone have any other recommendations?
Any advice greatly appreciated!
Helen
Helen Bleck
Heritage Resources Development Officer (John Gray Centre, Haddington)
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