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Jason Scott

@textfiles

8 Feb

@internetarchive

Folks, it is officially too hard to keep up with every single thread related to the scanner/scribe video @internetarchive put up. Since 90% of the responses seem to be speculation on a "better way" to do it, and concern for the nice lady in the video.......

Please direct them to the various threads where I or others have explained out the nature of book scanning as we've done it through millions of books, and that the job of book scanning is a service level job worse than others, better than others. Thanks! My fingers/time bless you

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1358541168288673796

Thread where I talk about "why u no use robot"

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1358541168288673796

Read 4 tweets

Jason Scott

@textfiles

8 Feb

@internetarchive

So, Reddit discovered the @internetarchive tweet about bookscanning. The thread is here:

reddit.com/r/interestinga…

I have observations.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1358541168288673796

The #1 with a bullet response by many people is "Surely this can be 100% automated, I can't believe a person is in there."

I addressed it in this tweet thread:

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1358541168288673796

So, it's been [0] days since the Internet has stumbled on a 20-year project with "thoughts"

The thread is already veering towards a thousand responses, many of them the aforementioned "Been here 5 minutes. Here's how it should go."

But it's also got real bookscanner employees and ex-employees in there, so there's some first-hand experience in there, at least.

Read 6 tweets

Jason Scott

@textfiles

7 Feb

After "What is the life and experience of a human scanner", the biggest reaction seems to be "Why is a human there, why not a machine". Solid question, but in the 20 years of doing this book scanning, I can assure you if a machine could do something, it's doing it. Not here.

People then link to a panopoly of robotic scanning examples, videos, one-sheets and demonstration pages for commercial or industrial scanning setups that turn the pages. Some of them we've been linked to for almost a decade, so we're pretty familiar with them! And they're neat!

In most cases, you have to calibrate the book for scanning. This process can take a while, and has to shift for each book. If every book was the same size/consistency, it'd be fine. But every book is not. Some are fragile. Others are thick.

Read 9 tweets

Jason Scott

@textfiles

7 Feb

Some people seeing the Internet Archive bookscanning thread asked about work conditions and had various reactions to it.

There's all sorts of rules on taking photos within work spaces, but this is what the CA book scanning center looked like in roughly 2011; I got permission.

It SOUNDS like a pretty quiet work environment, with the mechanical scanners shifting and people rustling books and papers. Some centers you have headphones to listen to podcasts/music. Some are in colleges, libraries, or office buildings.

Sometimes neat books go by. Often not.

It pays OK. It's a service job but you don't deal with people, you deal with books, which sits well with many folks who work in scanning. I've visited multiple centers over the last decade, in multiple countries and to various levels of announcing I'm visiting. They're solid.

Read 4 tweets

Jason Scott

@textfiles

7 Feb

With a burst of interest in the Book Scanning project at the Internet Archive, allow me to link you to some of the fruits of that labor, so you can see what the results of this process are.

A general history of the pyrates, : from their first rise and settlement in the Island of Providence, to the present time.

1724 book! Instantly readable, zoomable.

archive.org/details/genera…