A New Toy at the Library

thegenealogygirl

6 years ago

The first page of text from the Telesphore Brouillette book, exactly as it scanned, saved as a jpeg. Looks pretty good!

On Friday I went on a little adventure with my favorite 5-year-old pal. I picked him up from Kindergarten, had a quick lunch, and then we were off to BYU for some important work. I had reserved an overhead scanner so that I could scan the Telesphore Brouillette book my cousin Margaret mailed to me.

Now you might be wondering about my taking a 5-year-old to a Family History Library. (You aren’t the only one. A certain well-known genealogist who has strong opinions about who should and should not work on genealogy doesn’t think he belongs there either. And yet, he is always there when I show up with my kiddo. Haha!) I swear, my kid is the best 5-year-old ever. A few new Kindergarten apps on my phone, and the promise of a “pink cookie” after we are done and that kid is an angel. Well. He is always an angel.

We arrived and I went to the desk because I wasn’t sure which scanner was the one I had reserved, when low and behold I spotted this brand new beauty.

It was love at first sight. I bailed on my scheduled scanner and used this brand-spankin’ new toy. Okay. I don’t actually know how new it really is. It’s new since the last time I went to BYU.

It can’t be reserved, but I lucked out and it was free. I scanned the Telesphore Brouillette book – all 185ish pages – in 45 minutes.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES!

Do you know how long it would have taken me on a flat-bed scanner?!

Me neither. But a reeeeeeally long time. Like a few weeks. Maybe even two months.

(Insert an explanation here about patrons at the center and not having lots of time and getting bored if I scan for too long. etc. etc.)

The best part was that I was way less worried about damaging the book. It is so simple to just turn the page and hit scan. Way less wear and tear on the spine and binding.

You can see a bit of the fancy scanning tech in this photo. Also the books on Japanese something or other that were the perfect plain black to use as my “weights” to hold the pages open.

I will definitely be using this scanner again. In fact, I did a few test pages of a different item I have been scanning, the painfully slow way, that I am going to compare and see if I like the quality well enough to switch to this scanner.

So for those who may wonder… this scanner can scan at 600 dpi, save to a thumb-drive or upload to the cloud (and maybe email…? I think there were four save options). The available formats include jpeg, pdf, searchable pdf – which is FABULOUSLY accurate by the way, and a few others I ignored. There is no tiff setting. You can save as one set of images or as individual images. You can save in one format and then save again in another format, over and over until you have everything you want. As you are scanning, if you notice a scan isn’t what you want – not straight enough or something – you can select those images and delete them, rescan those pages, and then keep scanning.

I am in love!

My cute little pumpkin was an angel as always. He definitely earned his “pink cookie” after a nice leisurely stroll across campus. He insisted on stomping on crunchy leaves and then throwing them up in the air by the handsful while I took some pictures.