At MayDay Rooms we have been running regular scanathon as part of our practice around digitisation. The idea behind these session is that we collectivise the work of archival digitisation as well as give people a chance to look at the archive in a different way. During these sessions we often focus on a single collection and guide people through multiple digitisation workflows and techniques. Many of these workflows we have developed ourselves, however we draw on priceless tools produced by many of comrades and collaborators (namely campcamcapture, memoryoftheworld.org and mazizone). We have also attempted where possible to embed digitisation into the archival usage so that those using the archive can scan material as they go along.
So much of archival digitisation seems to be an endless production line of monotonous labour, in which the end result a digitisation being confined to the catalogued, confined by digital right management or having material redacted so that it can both comply with copyright and be ‘open access’. We want to attempt to reverse these e
Readable but not upholdant to quality, distributed and no contained,
Here are some guide to some of the tools and workflows we use:
MAZI ZONE
Welcome to library.mdr portable archive.
We have set up a mini server that enables you to download parts of our collection on to your phone, computer or tablet. Once it’s there it’s up to you what you do with them, share, print, copy, destroy….
At MDR we want to experiment with different forms archival dissemination and to share our collections as widely and to set these revolutionary pdfs, jpegs and png file free on the network to do some of ou our political work for us.
You can find actually wifi at MDR, that password is playnice
SCANNING APPS
Text Fairy OCR Text Scanning app
– text fairy is a FLOSS application developed for andriod. MDR tries to use FLOSS were possible and Text Fairy is one of the only non-propriatorial scanning apps.
What can you do with Text Fairy:
* Converts an image to text
* Correct the viewpoint of an image
* Edit extracted text
* Convert the scanned page into PDF
* Recognises printed text from more than 50 laguages
Instructions
You can download from Play Store or built from github (https://github.com/renard314/textfairy)
Use the camera icon on the top right side of the screen to photograph the document. You can photograph single pages or as batches.
Use sharp images with good lightening for best results. Try to use the
Unfortunately you can not use Text Fairy on iPhones so the one that we prefer is Genuis scan.
Genuis Scan can be downloaded from the App Store. Therre is a free version and on that costs, the free version has ads but this is the one we recommend. Genuis Scan
Inportant to know with these apps is where the Pdf files generated from the app
Bookscanning and CAMPCAMCAPTURE