18.373 page imaging without dismembering?

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 373.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 07:52:28 +0000
         From: Andrew Gollan <tharoth_at_gmail.com>
         Subject: Good quality page images without dismembering books

Dear humanists,

I'm working up a project where we want to get hold of rather a lot of
good legible page images from large format books printed about 100
years ago. Are there services or equipment which can avoid the page
distortions towards the spine, or correct same, that would allow us to
get good enough images to consider republication on paper, web
publication and OCR, without cutting these handsome volumes into
pieces?

These are lexica, notorious for font and size changes, foreign scripts
and curious punctuation. What kind of resolution to think would be
needed for reasonable quality reproduction? Are there high resolution
cameras and copying stands that specifically address this kind of
work?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew Gollan,
Classics, University of Kentucky.
Received on Tue Nov 23 2004 - 03:11:23 EST