Micro Fiche Library.
Al Kossow
aek at bitsavers.org
Tue Oct 4 11:16:03 CDT 2016
On 10/4/16 8:02 AM, Shaun Halstead wrote:
>> I'd like to work to-wards scanning all of the library into a system.
>> Anybody know anything about fiche scanners.
>
>
> This is exactly what my company does (and my previous, now defunct,
> employer as well). I have dedicated microfiche and microfilm scanners.
> The problem I ran into when trying to scan my DEC microfiche collection was
> that the fiche themselves were of very poor quality. Badly scratched and
> scuffed, and poor quality duplicates.
>
> Jim mentioned that dedicated microfilm scanners are expensive. He's not
> kidding. Used machines tend to start around $5k USD for a low end, heavily
> used scanner. New machines are generally $30k at the lowest end. Flatbed
> photographic film scanners are much cheaper, but also slower. However,
> with some scripting and tools like the ImageMagick library, you can scan an
> entire fiche in one pass, then slice up the image into individual pages
> accordingly.
>
many people have jousted at this particular windmill
this is a huge time-consuming project
I have literally thousands of sheets of DEC fiche from multiple sources
scanning at that kind of volume doesn't scale. you have to clean an qc every sheet
even with a production scanner. It took me most of a day to do the little bit of xxdp
fiche a couple of weeks ago on a manual positioning Canon microfilm/microfiche scanner
at CHM
I just bought another high-end scanner, which isn't running yet. It uses glass carriers
for each sheet and I have about 6 carriers.
I was hoping it could handle IBM punched-card sized fiche, but I've not been able to
find a carrier that big. I have a rather large backlog of those as well.
More information about the cctech
mailing list